The Data

What is invented, and what is real

Invented: the restaurant, its menu and every sale. A generator draws each dish’s portions for each day, and the same seed gives the same sales on any machine. Real, in the runs that use them: the public holidays of Spain and Catalonia, and the weather observed in Cubelles.

The shape

One row per date and dish, with the quantity sold. A closed day is a row too, with a quantity of zero.

What a model is given

Past sales, and the weather: what was observed on the days before the origin date, and for the origin date only the forecast issued the day before.

Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0).

How it is generated

Each dish has a base quantity, a factor for each weekday and a slow trend. Events lift or lower a day, and in runs with weather, temperature and rain move it too. A day’s expected quantity is the product of those, and the quantity sold is one negative-binomial draw around it, so it scatters the way real sales do. The draws start from seed 42.