Time for me to re-post my perennial "fun banana facts" post: Bananas are the #1 most-sold item at most grocery stores including, notably, Wal-Mart. Bananas also have the highest standard deviation in terms of predicting if a given (known) consumer will purchase bananas in a given store run. (At least as compared to other food products and consumables.) When predicting a consumer's shop, it's generally pretty easy to…
When I worked on recommendation systems 15 years ago, I learned about the "banana problem", where bananas are so commonly purchased, they tend to be the top recommendation regardless of other foods in your cart. The solution, of course, was to bias for less commonly purchased items, but it was my first run-in with the weird statistics around banana purchasing patterns.