Assortment optimization has received active explorations in the past few decades due to its practical importance. Despite the extensive literature dealing with optimization algorithms and latent score estimation, uncertainty quantification for the optimal assortment still needs to be explored and is of great practical significance. Instead of estimating and recovering the complete optimal offer set, decision-makers may only be interested in testing whether a given property holds true for the optimal assortment, such as whether they should include several products of interest in the optimal set, or how many categories of products the optimal set should include. This paper proposes a novel inferential framework for testing such properties. We consider the widely adopted multinomial logit (MNL) model, where we assume that each customer will purchase an item within the offered products with a probability proportional to the underlying preference score associated with the product. We reduce inferring a general optimal assortment property to quantifying the uncertainty associated with the sign change point detection of the marginal revenue gaps. We show the asymptotic normality of the marginal revenue gap estimator, and construct a maximum statistic via the gap estimators to detect the sign change point. By approximating the distribution of the maximum statistic with multiplier bootstrap techniques, we propose a valid testing procedure. We also conduct numerical experiments to assess the performance of our method.

Two factors had an effect on the deals we saw this week: spring sales and early Mother's Day promotions. Even if you don't need a gift for a mom or it's still cold (or weirdly summery hot) where you are, you can snag a decent price on some of our recommended tech. Like our top budget robot vacuum, iRobot's Roomba 694, which dropped back down to $179. Apple's only sub-$1,000 laptop, the MacBook Air M1, is $200 off at Best Buy only. We also saw a few deals on gadgets we like for the kitchen, like our favorite air fryer and a Vitamix blender. Both the latest and previous generation standard iPad are on sale, as is the older, but still-great M1 MacBook Air.

Never mind using AI to write stories -- Walmart is finding it helpful for landing a good bargain. The retailer tells Bloomberg that it's using a chatbot from Pactum AI to automatically negotiate some supplier deals. The technology is not only saving an average of three percent on contracts, but preferable to the vendors. Three out of four suppliers prefer haggling with the AI over a human, Walmart says. Pactum's system just asks Walmart to set its budget and requirements, such as discounts and payment terms.

The well-reviewed, yet pricey, PlayStation VR2 headset is making its way to retailers after a two-month stint of exclusivity at Sony's Direct consumer storefront. The company shared the news on Twitter, but has not set an official date or even announced what lucky retailers would get their mitts on the PS5-adjacent headset. Sony tells customers to check with local retailers for availability information. UK retailer ShopTo has suggested that the VR headset will be in stock starting May 12th, though it remains to be seen if that date holds for every online and brick-and-mortar retail location out there. It is worth noting that May 12th is when a little mom-and-pop video game called The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases on Switch, so get ready for crowds if you head into a store looking for just a VR headset.

As bookstores struggle to survive across the country, a Tokyo-based IT firm has decided to go against the stream by entering the sector. For Freee, an IT firm that provides cloud-based applications to manage back-office tasks, opening Tomei Shoten (transparent bookstore) in Tokyo's Taito Ward last week marked an opportunity to experiment with an unconventional business strategy of disclosing real-time sales while also learning more about running a small-scale business. Due to the rise of e-books and online shopping, the number of bookstores in Japan has been falling for the past decade or so. There were 11,495 such outlets as of March, down 30% from 16,371 in the same month in 2013, according to the Japan Publishing Organization for Information Infrastructure Development. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software.

Many recent works on Entity Resolution (ER) leverage Deep Learning techniques involving language models to improve effectiveness. This is applied to both main steps of ER, i.e., blocking and matching. Several pre-trained embeddings have been tested, with the most popular ones being fastText and variants of the BERT model. However, there is no detailed analysis of their pros and cons. To cover this gap, we perform a thorough experimental analysis of 12 popular language models over 17 established benchmark datasets. First, we assess their vectorization overhead for converting all input entities into dense embeddings vectors. Second, we investigate their blocking performance, performing a detailed scalability analysis, and comparing them with the state-of-the-art deep learning-based blocking method. Third, we conclude with their relative performance for both supervised and unsupervised matching. Our experimental results provide novel insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the main language models, facilitating researchers and practitioners to select the most suitable ones in practice.

Earth Day shouldn't be a one-day celebration of the planet. Make April 22 a day to consider your impact on the world and how you can make permanent changes to your lifestyle to lessen your ecological footprint, even by a little. We rounded up some extras here earlier in the week. Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). This includes unlimited access to WIRED.com and our print magazine (if you'd like).

Amazon Prime has become the first streaming giant to finally counter the poor sound quality of modern flatscreen TVs. There has been a surge in people watching shows and movies with subtitles due to mumbled dialogue and background noise that is too loud. Amazon has launched its Dialogue Boost, making it easier to hear characters talking without compromising quality. The AI-powered feature isolates speech patterns, enhancing audio without increasing music or effects. The AI-powered feature enhances dialogue without increasing music and effects.

CEO and founder Michael Seifert creates a new marketplace for businesses that respect'fundamental' American values. Let's face it, there's data online about us everywhere. From our social media profiles to our online shopping habits, it seems like there's no escaping the collection of our personal information. And while some of this data is necessary for certain services, such as online shopping with Amazon, it's important to know what information is being collected and how it's being used. The good news is that you have some level of control over the data you're giving to Amazon.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning (ML), enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Amazon Kendra uses ML algorithms to enable users to use natural language queries to search for information scattered across multiple data souces in an enterprise, including commonly used document storage systems like Microsoft OneDrive. OneDrive is an online cloud storage service that allows you to host your content and have it automatically sync across multiple devices. We're excited to announce that we have updated the OneDrive connector for Amazon Kendra to add even more capabilities. For example, we have added support to search OneNote documents.