Abstract: Accurate profit forecasting is critical for small-scale pharmacies, particularly in resource-constrained environments where financial decisions must be both timely and data-informed. This study investigates the predictive performance of sixteen regression models for daily profit forecasting using transactional data collected from a single local pharmacy in Sabha, Libya, over a 14-month period. An exploratory data analysis revealed strong right-skewed distributions in sales, cost, and profit, as well as pronounced temporal patterns, including seasonal peaks during spring and early summer and weekly profit clustering around weekends. After outlier treatment using the interquartile range method. A total of sixteen regression models were developed and evaluated, encompassing linear models (Linear, Ridge, Lasso, ElasticNet), tree-based models (Decision Tree, Random Forest, Extra Trees, Gradient Boosting, AdaBoost), proximity-based models (K-Nearest Neighbors), kernel-based models (Support Vector Regression), and neural architectures (Multi-Layer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network, Long Short-Term Memory, Gated Recurrent Unit). The models were assessed using Mean Absolute Error, Mean Squared Error, Root Mean Squared Error, and the R-squared score. The results consistently showed that tree-based ensemble models—particularly Extra Trees and LightGBM—achieved the highest accuracy, with R² values of 0.978 and 0.975 respectively, significantly outperforming neural and linear models. Learning curves and residual plots further confirmed the superior generalization and robustness of these models. We acknowledge that the dataset size (424 records) and the deterministic relationship between sales, costs, and profit influence these metrics. The study highlights the importance of model selection tailored to domain-specific data characteristics and suggests that well-tuned ensemble methods may offer reliable, interpretable, and scalable solutions for profit forecasting in simialr low-resource retail environments. However, broad claims of usefulness for all low-resource settings should be tempered by the limited scope of this dataset. Future work should consider longer-term data and external economic indicators to further improve model reliability, and focus on operational deployment strategies, investigating how these models can be integrated into daily pharmacy workflows despite real-time data constraints.

Accurate electricity forecasting is vital for grid stability and effective energy management, particularly in regions like Benghazi, Libya, which face frequent load shedding, generation deficits, and aging infrastructure. This study introduces a data-driven framework to forecast electricity load, generation, and deficits for 2025 using historical data from two distinct years: 2019 (an instability year) and 2023 (a stability year). Various time series models were employed, including Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), seasonal ARIMA, dynamic regression ARIMA, extreme gradient boosting, simple exponential smoothing, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural networks. Data preprocessing steps—such as missing value imputation, outlier smoothing, and logarithmic transformation—are applied to enhance data quality. Model performance was evaluated using metrics such as mean squared error, root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error. LSTM outperformed other models, achieving the lowest mentioned metric values for forecasting load, generation, and deficits, demonstrating its ability to handle non-stationarity, seasonality, and extreme events. The study’s key contribution is the development of an optimized LSTM framework tailored to North Benghazi’s electricity patterns, incorporating a rich dataset and exogenous factors like temperature and humidity. These findings offer actionable insights for energy policymakers and grid operators, enabling proactive resource allocation, demand-side management, and enhanced grid resilience. The research highlights the potential of advanced machine learning techniques to address energy-forecasting challenges in resource-constrained regions, paving the way for a more reliable and sustainable electricity system.