Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 109 posts

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

#91

Post by cwyers »

dkokelley wrote: post #45
_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.

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.)

They could use some of this vaunted machine learning to figure it out.

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

#93

Post by bane »

nerdponx wrote: post #60
_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.

From Amazon's perspective, it doesn't have to work for you ; it has to work on average .

An AUC of .5 isn't considered good in ML

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

#95

Post by dodobirdlord »

citilife wrote: post #87
nerdponx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Amazon's perspective, it doesn't have to work for you ; it has to work on average .

In that case, it may be better to just put the hot new item in a category they know you purchase in. For instance, if I have a subscription to paper towels, maybe they should send me a subscription recommendation for toilet paper.

I'm sure someone thought to A/B test the recommendation engine against the whatever-happens-to-be-selling-right-now engine and the recommendation engine won.

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

#97

Post by pjscott »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #33
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.

https://twitter.com/girlfromblupo/status/982156453396996096?... "Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself."

From Amazon's perspective, someone who just bought a toilet seat is much more likely than the average person to buy another one. Maybe they're doing interior furnishing work and put loads of seats on toilets. Maybe they're replacing a broken crappy plastic seat on one of their toilets with a nicer one -- might they perhaps decide to upgrade their other toilets as well?

And sure, I know that these are all pretty weak signals and that the toilet seat recommendations will probably go un-clicked. But Amazon has to do the best it can with not very much information, and if they have to hawk toilet seats to a hundred people who've already bought them to find the one guy who's remodeling several bathrooms, that's probably a really good gamble for them to take.

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

#98

Post by TheCoelacanth »

bane wrote: post #93
nerdponx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Amazon's perspective, it doesn't have to work for you ; it has to work on average .

An AUC of .5 isn't considered good in ML

That very much depends on the domain. In this case, I suspect it would be considered phenomenally good since a human would achieve a much lower number. Conversion rates for web ads created by humans are typically not more than a few percent.

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

#99

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #47
saosebastiao wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

So this has been bothering me, because if every birth in one year is to a woman who gave birth the previous year, and the years have equal birth rates, and we ignore aging in/out of the "fertile" demographic, then the odds of giving birth in one year given that you gave birth last year are 100%, well over 5x the population rate.

The claim is that the odds of giving birth this year given you gave birth last year are equal to the odds of giving birth this year given you're fertile, or in other words that, if you're fertile, whether you give birth this year is probabilistically independent of whether you gave birth last year. This is quite clearly false -- your odds of giving birth in one year are much lower, given you gave birth the year before, than your odds of giving birth in any randomly-selected year during which you're fertile. But my argument above is wrong.

For patio11's claim to be true, 6.1% of women who gave birth in one year would need to give birth again the next year. (Stated equivalently, 6.1% of people would need to have an older sibling born one calendar year before themselves.)

Post reply on HN