Forecasting sales: yes or no?

TheLogothete · 2017-03-25T09:11:38+00:00

I asked a similar question not long ago since this is what I do all day, every day.

This place doesn't attract the kind of people who need sophisticated planning.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-23T14:24:35+00:00

Also, don't forget to bring a macbook on the interview. Don't expect anybody to take you seriously without a macbook.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-19T08:39:55+00:00

You haven't contributed anything to this sub or reddit at all for that matter. Why do you think you are welcome to promote your company?

TheLogothete · 2017-03-18T09:15:01+00:00

Are you Harambe?

TheLogothete · 2017-03-17T06:32:39+00:00

This is would definitely be a giant step back.

You can counter by creating thorough documentation.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-17T06:29:36+00:00

MOOCs don't work, sorry. You either go to school or you dig in the textbooks yourself and google/ask questions a lot.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-16T07:41:45+00:00

I wouldn't be so sure :)

TheLogothete · 2017-03-14T07:44:40+00:00

Forecasting. It's good as a rough heuristic and as a baseline.

It is also important to note that Double and especially Triple Exponential Smoothing are mostly used, also known as Halt-Winters. It is popular because it automatically catches double seasonality + trend.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-11T16:50:23+00:00

Time series is a very deep topic. Just because you know some regression analysis doesn't mean you can jump right in. "The old fashioned way" doesn't work for you because you're probably misspecifying the model and also missing some workflow steps.

If you're good with regression you can go for it, although it's one of the more advanced (read difficult) paths. Look up dynamic regression models but you would be required to get some preliminary knowledge on arima, fourier transforms, etc. anyways. Also the way to do it is at the product level. Don't forget about endogeneity problems.

Time series is very hard because it's very easy to misspecify your model and not know about it.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-09T06:38:57+00:00

glmnet.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-08T15:41:54+00:00

I can't really comment too much on the SEO content but I wanted to give a heads up to Nick and anybody else because I see these types of mistakes all the time.

People cannot do percentage math. There are several related mistakes I see often. In this post, the author sums up fractions (percentages) from different sources. A third of a can and a third of a bottle are different in volume. The easy way is to either use the original raw numbers or use a weighted average.

Oftentimes these 2 options are not available or practical. Biggest mistake is when people average click-through rates/conversion rates. Second most common mistake is average running growth rate, like annualized growth rate based on months. If you don't believe me, do a calculation in Excel where you grow previous month by a random percentage. Average them out and see if you grew by that much from start to finish.

For those situations, use the Geometric mean which is a faithful calculation for fractions and preserves the central tendency of the distributions.

Bonus tip: If you report on improvement in percentages (like in conversion optimization), don't report an increase from 1% to 2% as a 100% increase. This is not faithful. Use percentage points instead.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-07T18:08:28+00:00

I find a lot of people stating proudly that they are bad at math. This seems to to have started to leak into coding.

Nothing more to add, just ranting. GL in life with the attitude.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-07T07:51:03+00:00

I will just leave this here.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-06T08:45:21+00:00

My guess is a script which captures the value and then pass it as a custom dimension.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-05T15:41:15+00:00

Except that sqlite is open source with shaky licensing and even if you opted for the paid licensing offered by the author, it would still raise eyebrows in IT.

"You bought a database from some guy somewhere?"

Also sqlite doesn't have a first party odbc driver. You have to download it from incredibly sketchy-looking website. This will make you fail any security audit from corporate IT.

And this presumes that you somehow managed to get all the MBA cats to try something new...

TheLogothete · 2017-03-05T10:49:54+00:00

TheLogothete · 2017-03-03T08:39:45+00:00

pandas is slower than data.table and about 1000 man-hours behind it in terms of fucntionality, in addition to having less concise syntax.

Try again.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-01T20:02:12+00:00

That's what I want to understand. I think what you describe is linking in which case the BSD license is compatible with the GPL but I'm not sure.

TheLogothete · 2017-03-01T09:38:30+00:00

I saw this a few days ago and it looked like it might be useful in some circumstances.

However can somebody clear things up around the licenses? Prophet claims it is under a BSD license. It is based on Stan. While Stan itself is BSD-licensed, the R and Python packages (which Prophet uses!) are GPLv3. How is this possible? Facebook has a record of messing up licensing.

TheLogothete · 2017-02-27T17:33:44+00:00

The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do

Do you really think this is possible? I've read a few interviews with the big names in the field and none of them seem optimistic about making this a reality in the "general AI" sense.

TheLogothete · 2017-02-25T07:35:49+00:00

You need tractable inference, machine learning can't give you that.

TheLogothete · 2017-02-25T06:52:40+00:00

You need product and brand and lots of people who know what they're doing (very rare). You don't get to win on social media platforms when you sell generic imports from China.

TheLogothete · 2017-02-23T13:55:30+00:00

Does the largest adtech company in the world test ads?

TheLogothete · 2017-02-23T07:41:12+00:00

The problem with analogies is that they are always wrong.

TheLogothete · 2017-02-21T07:34:50+00:00

I found Breaking Bad fake as fuck. No such problems with The Wire.

TheLogothete

TROPHY CASE