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You Too Can Save Loads of Money: The Details of the Bayesian Model

tech.zalando.com

1–7 of 7 posts

Re: You Too Can Save Loads of Money: The Details of the Bayesian Model

#4
Does their cost/benefit analysis incorporate the cost of paying data scientists to build these models?

I'm really confused as to how the weight of a SKU is not information that's readily available to them from the manufacturer, or why a missing weight can't be determined as part of the fulfillment process. After all, you only need to weigh a SKU once, so it's only a problem the first time that item is packed. You'd think knowing the weights of products in your warehouse would be a solved problem by 3PLs and not one requiring the services of people with graduate degrees in statistics.

Re: You Too Can Save Loads of Money: The Details of the Bayesian Model

#5

Does their cost/benefit analysis incorporate the cost of paying data scientists to build these models? I'm really confused as to how the weight of a SKU is not information that's readily available to them from the manufacturer, or why a missing weight can't be determined as part of the fulfillment process. After all, you only need to weigh a SKU once, so it's only a problem the first time that item is packed. You'd t…

Clothes and shoes have a high turnover (fashion) and multiple variants per SKU. I can see a manufacturer not providing perfect or accurate weights for every shoe size for every style.

Re: You Too Can Save Loads of Money: The Details of the Bayesian Model

#7

If the authors see this, I'd be interested to learn what MCMC package they use.

we used our own C++ multi-threaded Gibbs sampler, which turned out to mix fast enough for the estimation - even given the large number of parcels/items we have at Zalando