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Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

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Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#41

Post by bduerst »

afthonos wrote: post #34
_uhtu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost sales.

That’s assuming those are the alternatives. If the alternative is instead to show you something you’ve already ordered or nothing, the odds of you ordering again if you see the thing you’ve ordered already are small, but nonzero.

That's a false dichotomy. There's a number of things they can show you, not just reorder or nothing.

In a perfect world for targeting sales, they will predict and show you exactly what it is you want to buy next. Repurchasing is just a very lazy way of predicting what you'll buy next.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#42

Post by bduerst »

rubicon33 wrote: post #23
have_faith wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

All that machine learning and they still haven't cracked down on counterfeit goods on their platform?

That would require Amazon to prioritize customer satisfaction over bulk sales.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#44

Post by [deleted] »

nautilus12 wrote: post #8
have_faith wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

My guess is that they are really bad at de-duping products. Product ids vs skus and all that jazz is historically not handled well in recommender systems, and those product not recognized as variants of already purchased products end up being the closest in the "graph" to be recommended so shoot to the top.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#45

Post by dkokelley »

_uhtu wrote: post #30
snowwrestler wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that this recommendation behavior is only unintelligent if it has a downside, i.e. reduces Amazon's profits. Companies (and their AIs) only care about your business transactions, not whether you're annoyed. I'm sure Amazon engineering is well aware of the jokes about their recommendation engines. But their recommendation engines are not calibrated to reduce jokes, they are calibrated to increa…

That's not true, putting a product I've already ordered on my recommended list instead of something i actually want to buy is costing them money in lost sales.

Amazon also doesn't know if this is a single use or consumable item. Some things have significant marginal utility beyond 1, and others can be consumed and need to be reordered. (Charging cables, Amazon echo for multiple rooms, paper goods, etc.)

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#46

Post by ojilles »

bduerst wrote: post #41
afthonos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s assuming those are the alternatives. If the alternative is instead to show you something you’ve already ordered or nothing, the odds of you ordering again if you see the thing you’ve ordered already are small, but nonzero.

That's a false dichotomy. There's a number of things they can show you, not just reorder or nothing. In a perfect world for targeting sales, they will predict and show you exactly what it is you want to buy next. Repurchasing is just a very lazy way of predicting what you'll buy next.

I'm not afthonos, but I think his/her point is that they may not be able to predict exactly what it is you want to buy.

(I find it super annoying, too; but that doesn't mean folks have figured out purchase reco's at scale)

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#47

Post by thaumasiotes »

saosebastiao wrote: post #40
thaumasiotes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a true statement: People who will in 2018 give birth to a child named Abigail are at least 5X more likely to give birth to a child in 2019 than people chosen at random. > "Naming your child Abigail can't make you more likely to get pregnant." > Again, failure to do the math. > (You get a 2X there, for free, from the observation "If you had a child named Abigail this year you are biologically capable of havin…

> This is terrible math. Nursing a child severely inhibits getting pregnant; without use of formula (or a substitute like goat's milk or what have you), it is extremely rare for children to be spaced only one year apart. It's rare enough that there's a special term for such children -- "Irish twins". The timespan for two separate births in 2018 and 2019 isn't 12 months, it is anywhere between 12 and 24 months. While…

Yes, giving birth twice in 24 months is normal, but that gives you a very narrow window within 2018/2019.

If you give birth in July of 2018, an 18 month spacing won't let you give birth in any month of 2019. That's still a very significant negative adjustment to "demographic factors get you to 5X+". Demographic factors aren't the only factors there are.

edit: a quick sanity check tells us the factor of 5 estimate is off by a huge amount. From https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/births.htm :

> Birth rate: 12.2 per 1,000 population

This is the birth rate (for 2016, in the US) reflecting the odds that a randomly-selected person, male, female, infant, or menopausal, will give birth in a calendar year.

> Fertility rate: 62.0 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44

And this is the birth rate demographically adjusted for the ability to give birth. It's about five times higher.

Since siblings born in consecutive calendar years are rare, we can only conclude that patio11's "true statement" is false by a pretty large margin. For it to be true, every birth in 2016 would have to have been to a woman who also gave birth in 2015.

I wish that, before asserting something is true, people would think about whether it's true.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#48

Post by gweinberg »

bduerst wrote: post #39
have_faith wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that machine learning and they still think I would like to re-buy every product I've ever purchased.

I know this is a joke, but you're a magnitude more likely to buy something if you've already bought it once. The whole retargeting industry is built on this, but I agree - it doesn't necessarily make it useful.

Depends on the something. If I buy a carton of milk, I'm pretty likely to buy another before too long. If I buy a new refrigerator, probably not. Besides, the point of advertising is to get you to buy things you otherwise wouldn't. It would be pretty pointless to show me an ad that says "you love eggs, you eat them for breakfast every day, so buy some next time you're at the supermarket", because I was going to do that anyway.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#49

Post by new_printer »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #21

I haven't had a lot of time to look at the offering, but can anybody tell me if these courses have any theory, or are they just for promoting specific AWS ML services without going into the underlying complexity?

There is a "Math for Machine Learning" course.

Re: Amazon’s own ‘Machine Learning University’ now available to all developers

#50

Post by alehul »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #24
alehul wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always been frustrated about this as well, but I realized that it's often not Google's intention to care about this error. We're the product, willing or not, and the metric some chainsaw companies care about is simply 'searched "chainsaw"'. Google is happy to sell our eyes based on that, whether or not it converts into actual sales. In fact, for Google to deduce further and use ML to say "this user actually isn'…

Except you don’t pay Google for views, you pay for clicks. So it is in their interest to show things that convert.

Aren't there several options for what to optimize for? Such as views, clicks, conversions, etc?

Additionally, aren't there filters companies can choose, such as targeting users who have searched for certain keywords?

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