can we predict growth percentage in sales of an item given the change in discount(positive or negative number) from the previous year as a predictor variable. There seems to be no correlation between these. How to solve this problem using machine learning?
You are on the wrong track to ask this question.
Correlation is on the knowledge side of Statistics, Please check Pearson’s correlation of coefficient / Spearman’s correlation of coefficient in order to find the correlation between the discount changes and the sales groth correlation.
In Machine Learning, we seldom compare two percentage data, instead, we compare the actual sales/discount value. A simple ML can be applied by Linear regression (most ML is used in multi-dimension, as your case is one-x one-y data (single column to single output). Please refer to related information online and solved with excel or python code.