📈 AI-Powered Sales Forecasting Dashboard
🔍 About the Task
In this real-world internship project, you’ll build a predictive analytics dashboard that helps retail businesses forecast their future sales. You’ll work with historical transaction data, apply machine learning models to predict upcoming trends, and present insights with an interactive Power BI dashboard.
This task blends data science, business understanding, and visualization — and is exactly the kind of project clients want in consulting, analytics, and retail SaaS.
✅ What You’ll Do
- Clean and structure historical retail sales data.
- Engineer features like monthly averages, holiday spikes, and seasonal indicators.
- Train a time series forecasting model (ARIMA, Prophet, or XGBoost).
- Build a Power BI dashboard showing past trends and future forecasts.
- Present your analysis with clear business recommendations.
🎯 Skills You’ll Gain
📊 Time series forecasting (Prophet, ARIMA, or ML models)
🧹 Data cleaning & feature engineering (Pandas, Excel)
📈 Visualization & storytelling (Power BI)
📦 Deployment of insights for business use
📍 Business acumen for sales analytics
🛠️ Tools You’ll Use
- Power BI Desktop – For building interactive dashboards
- Python – For model building (Prophet, Scikit-learn)
- Jupyter Notebook – For EDA & forecasting workflow
- Excel – Optional for preprocessing
- Facebook Prophet – Popular tool for time series forecasting
📁 Sample Datasets
Use any of these free, high-quality datasets to get started:
- 🛍️ Superstore Sales Dataset (Tableau Community)
- 🛒 Retail Sales Forecasting (Kaggle)
- 📆 Rossmann Store Sales (Kaggle)
📺 YouTube Tutorial to Get Started (for Reference)
🔗 Video: “Sales Forecasting in Power BI using Prophet + Python”
Watch Here
This step-by-step video walks through the full pipeline — loading data, applying forecasting, and creating a dashboard in Power BI.
🔑 Key Features to Include
✔ Sales trend line with actual vs. forecasted data
✔ Monthly & yearly comparisons
✔ Filters by category/store/region
✔ Highlight top-selling items & low seasons
✔ Insight cards for decision-making