State-of-the-art forecasting: Demand planning is a critical part of a businessâ operations. Traditional approaches to forecasting use statistical methods to predict future demand from past transactions, but do not take into account contextual data. However, there are good reasons to believe that contextual data - such as weather, events, product descriptions, sentiment analysis (from reviews, Zendesk tickets, social media), and more - can contribute significant signals that directly influence forecasting accuracy for the better.