# Leveraging Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Store Sales Forecasting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19267 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19267/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 9 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [An Empirical Evaluation of Generic Convolutional and Recurrent Networks for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01271/) (2018)
- [Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04875/) (2017)
- [Graph WaveNet for Deep Spatial-Temporal Graph Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00121/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work evaluates the effectiveness of spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for multi-store retail sales forecasting and compares their performance against ARIMA, LSTM, and XGBoost baselines. Using weekly sales data from 45 Walmart stores, we construct a relational forecasting framework that models inter-store dependencies through a learned adaptive graph. The proposed STGNN predicts log-differenced sales and reconstructs final values through a residual path, enabling stable training and improved generalisation. Experiments show that STGNN achieves the lowest overall forecasting error, outperforming all baselines in Normalised Total Absolute Error, P90 MAPE, and variance of MAPE across stores. Analysis of the learned adjacency matrix reveals meaningful functional store clusters and high-influence nodes that emerge without geographic metadata. These results demonstrate that relational structure significantly improves forecast quality in interconnected retail environments and establishes STGNNs as a robust modelling choice for multi-store demand prediction.