EventCast: Hybrid Demand Forecasting in E-Commerce with LLM-Based Event Knowledge

Executive Summary

Demand forecasting is a cornerstone of e-commerce operations, directly impacting inventory planning and fulfillment scheduling. However, existing forecasting systems often fail during high-impact periods such as flash sales, holiday campaigns, and sudden policy interventions, where demand patterns shift abruptly and unpredictably. In this paper, we introduce EventCast, a modular forecasting framework that integrates future event knowledge into time-series prediction. Unlike prior approaches that ignore future interventions or directly use large language models (LLMs) for numerical forecasting, EventCast leverages LLMs solely for event-driven reasoning. Unstructured business data, which covers campaigns, holiday schedules, and seller incentives, from existing operational databases, is processed by an LLM that converts it into interpretable textual summaries leveraging world knowledge for cultural nuances and novel event combinations. These summaries are fused with historical demand features within a dual-tower architecture, enabling accurate, explainable, and scalable forecasts. Deployed on real-world e-commerce scenarios spanning 4 countries of 160 regions over 10 months, EventCast achieves up to 86.9% and 97.7% improvement on MAE and MSE compared to the variant without event knowledge, and reduces MAE by up to 57.0% and MSE by 83.3% versus the best industrial baseline during event-driven periods. EventCast has deployed into real-world industrial pipelines since March 2025, offering a practical solution for improving operational decision-making in dynamic e-commerce environments.