Amazon Forecast now supports built-in holiday data for 251 countries to improve your forecasting accuracy

Amazon Forecast now supports holidays from 251 countries as a built-in featurization, improving the accuracy of your Forecast. Amazon Forecast uses machine learning (ML) to generate more accurate demand forecasts with just a few clicks, without requiring any prior ML experience.

Often times, external factors like holidays and weather changes impact the demand and supply of goods. This results in either surplus inventory or shortage causing disruption. Amazon Forecast provides you with an option to include built-in featurization like “holidays” and “weather” for your model training. With this launch, when selecting “Holidays”, you can now choose a country from a list of 251 countries whose holiday data will be leveraged to improve your forecast results. This feature is available in all Regions where Forecast is publicly available. For more information about Region availability, see AWS Regional Services.