In 2024, consumers in the United States expected to spend over one thousand U.S. dollars on holiday gifts on average. This is the first time the projected spending estimate reached that one thousand-dollar-mark. Holiday shopping The Christmas, or holiday season, is the single most critical sales period of the year for many retailers: this period includes days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and an increasing amount of Americans also shop online during this busy time. An incredible shopping hubbub is produced during this period, with a staggering 95 percent of U.S. consumers having said they intended to buy something during the Christmas season in 2024. Gift cards and vouchers Christmas is a public holiday in the United States and is celebrated on December 25th each year. It is known as a big economic stimulus for many people to purchase Christmas gifts for their beloved family and friends. After Christmas and New Year’s Eve, retail sales often peak again in January as many people redeem their received Christmas gift cards and vouchers. In fact, over half of U.S. consumers planned to buy gift cards or gift certificates for others. It is a popular gifting option, with many Americans indicating that it can be very convenient.

This dataset is a merged dataset created from the data provided in the competition "Store Sales - Time Series Forecasting". The other datasets that were provided there apart from train and test (for example holidays_events, oil, stores, etc.) could not be used in the final prediction. According to my understanding, through the EDA of the merged dataset, we will be able to get a clearer picture of the other factors that might also affect the final prediction of grocery sales. Therefore, I created this merged dataset and posted it here for the further scope of analysis.

##### Data Description Data Field Information (This is a copy of the description as provided in the actual dataset)

Train.csv - id: store id - date: date of the sale - store_nbr: identifies the store at which the products are sold. -**family**: identifies the type of product sold. - sales: gives the total sales for a product family at a particular store at a given date. Fractional values are possible since products can be sold in fractional units (1.5 kg of cheese, for instance, as opposed to 1 bag of chips). - onpromotion: gives the total number of items in a product family that were being promoted at a store on a given date. - Store metadata, including ****city, state, type, and cluster.**** - cluster is a grouping of similar stores. - Holidays and Events, with metadata NOTE: Pay special attention to the transferred column. A holiday that is transferred officially falls on that calendar day but was moved to another date by the government. A transferred day is more like a normal day than a holiday. To find the day that it was celebrated, look for the corresponding row where the type is Transfer. For example, the holiday Independencia de Guayaquil was transferred from 2012-10-09 to 2012-10-12, which means it was celebrated on 2012-10-12. Days that are type Bridge are extra days that are added to a holiday (e.g., to extend the break across a long weekend). These are frequently made up by the type Work Day which is a day not normally scheduled for work (e.g., Saturday) that is meant to pay back the Bridge. Additional holidays are days added to a regular calendar holiday, for example, as typically happens around Christmas (making Christmas Eve a holiday). - dcoilwtico: Daily oil price. Includes values during both the train and test data timeframes. (Ecuador is an oil-dependent country and its economic health is highly vulnerable to shocks in oil prices.)

**Note: ***There is a transaction column in the training dataset which displays the sales transactions on that particular date. * Test.csv - The test data, having the same features like the training data. You will predict the target sales for the dates in this file. - The dates in the test data are for the 15 days after the last date in the training data. **Note: ***There is a no transaction column in the test dataset as was there in the training dataset. Therefore, while building the model, you might exclude this column and may use it only for EDA.*

submission.csv - A sample submission file in the correct format.