Amazon Forecast now uses public holiday data from over 30 countries to improve forecast accuracy

Posted on: Feb 18, 2020

Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts, without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast is applicable in a wide variety of use cases, including energy demand forecasting, workforce planning, cloud infrastructure usage forecasting, inventory planning, traffic forecasting, and financial planning.

Amazon Forecast now uses holiday data from over 30 countries to improve forecast accuracy. Holidays like Memorial Day in the US or Australia Day in Australia can have a significant impact on your forecast. Until today the service only supported 5 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and Germany). With this change, customers can now incorporate holidays from several other countries including Brazil, Canada, France, India and Korea. To use the feature you only have to pass a two letter country code e.g. “US” (for the United States) using the Supplementary object in the Create Predictor API. You can learn more and find the full country list here. You can continue to use the Related Time Series to incorporate custom events or non-public holidays.