The Predictive Retailer is a retail company that utilizes the latest technological developments to connect with its customers to deliver an exceptional personalized experience to each and every one of them. Today, technology such as AI, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, IoT, Real-time stream processing, social media, and wearables are altering the Customer Experience (CX) landscape and retailers need to jump aboard this fast moving technology or run the risk of being left out in the cold. The Predictive Retailer reveals how these and other technologies can help shape the customer journey. The book details how the five types of analytics--descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive, and edge analytics--affect not only the customer journey, but also just about every operating function of the retailer. An IoT connected retailer can make its operations smart.

Today, Amazon SageMaker Canvas introduces the ability to use the Quick build feature with time series forecasting use cases. This allows you to train models and generate the associated explainability scores in under 20 minutes, at which point you can generate predictions on new, unseen data. Quick build training enables faster experimentation to understand how well the model fits to the data and what columns are driving the prediction, and allows business analysts to run experiments with varied datasets so they can select the best-performing model. Canvas expands access to machine learning (ML) by providing business analysts with a visual point-and-click interface that allows you to generate accurate ML predictions on your own--without requiring any ML experience or having to write a single line of code. In this post, we showcase how to to train a time series forecasting model faster with quick build training in Canvas.

Model deployment in machine learning (ML) is becoming increasingly complex. You want to deploy not just one ML model but large groups of ML models represented as ensemble workflows. These workflows are comprised of multiple ML models. Productionizing these ML models is challenging because you need to adhere to various performance and latency requirements. Amazon SageMaker supports single-instance ensembles with Triton Inference Server.

Predicting the behaviour of shoppers provides valuable information for retailers, such as the expected spend of a shopper or the total turnover of a supermarket. The ability to make predictions on an individual level is useful, as it allows supermarkets to accurately perform targeted marketing. However, given the expected number of shoppers and their diverse behaviours, making accurate predictions on an individual level is difficult. This problem does not only arise in shopper behaviour, but also in various business processes, such as predicting when an invoice will be paid. In this paper we present CAPiES, a framework that focuses on this trade-off in an online setting. By making predictions on a larger number of entities at a time, we improve the predictive accuracy but at the potential cost of usefulness since we can say less about the individual entities. CAPiES is developed in an online setting, where we continuously update the prediction model and make new predictions over time. We show the existence of the trade-off in an experimental evaluation in two real-world scenarios: a supermarket with over 160 000 shoppers and a paint factory with over 171 000 invoices.

A fundamental challenge of recommendation systems (RS) is understanding the causal dynamics underlying users' decision making. Most existing literature addresses this problem by using causal structures inferred from domain knowledge. However, there are numerous phenomenons where domain knowledge is insufficient, and the causal mechanisms must be learnt from the feedback data. Discovering the causal mechanism from RS feedback data is both novel and challenging, since RS itself is a source of intervention that can influence both the users' exposure and their willingness to interact. Also for this reason, most existing solutions become inappropriate since they require data collected free from any RS. In this paper, we first formulate the underlying causal mechanism as a causal structural model and describe a general causal structure learning framework grounded in the real-world working mechanism of RS. The essence of our approach is to acknowledge the unknown nature of RS intervention. We then derive the learning objective from our framework and propose an augmented Lagrangian solver for efficient optimization. We conduct both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate how our approach compares favorably to existing solutions, together with the empirical analysis from sensitivity and ablation studies.

In recent years, we've seen how rising costs, disrupted supply chains, and lockdowns can adversely affect businesses of any size. But there are some solutions that, if followed, can reduce your risk and help make turbulent times a little easier. This week on Let's Talk, our experts share their tips that will help you address the risks and prepare your business for any supply chain shocks. "There are several tactics that Australian business leaders can adopt to prepare for and address the aftershocks of shipment delays and stock unavailability. "Rather than relying on the just in time approach, which can be risky when there are supply shortages or shipping delays, the just in case approach is recommended. This approach focuses on forecasting demand to proactively secure sufficient supplies ahead of time. For this to work, a robust business management solution which grants to timely data which provides insight into incoming orders versus available stock is a key requirement. The just in case approach can boost profitability, while preventing wastage. "Having up-to-date industry data like procurement lead times, stock levels and order volumes can allow business owners to manage potential vulnerabilities in the supply chain and optimise efficiencies within. Finance teams can leverage this data allowing them to create more accurate financial forecasting models to save on supply chain costs and inventory management."

With the employment of smart meters, massive data on consumer behaviour can be collected by retailers. From the collected data, the retailers may obtain the household profile information and implement demand response. While retailers prefer to acquire a model as accurate as possible among different customers, there are two major challenges. First, different retailers in the retail market do not share their consumer's electricity consumption data as these data are regarded as their assets, which has led to the problem of data island. Second, the electricity load data are highly heterogeneous since different retailers may serve various consumers. To this end, a fully distributed short-term load forecasting framework based on a consensus algorithm and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is proposed, which may protect the customer's privacy and satisfy the accurate load forecasting requirement. Specifically, a fully distributed learning framework is exploited for distributed training, and a consensus technique is applied to meet confidential privacy. Case studies show that the proposed method has comparable performance with centralised methods regarding the accuracy, but the proposed method shows advantages in training speed and data privacy.

Beginner's Guide to Streamlit with Python begins with the basics of Streamlit by demonstrating how to build a basic application and advances to visualization techniques and their features. Next, it covers the various aspects of a typical Streamlit web application, and explains how to manage flow control and status elements. You'll also explore performance optimization techniques necessary for data modules in a Streamlit application. Following this, you'll see how to deploy Streamlit applications on various platforms. The book concludes with a few prototype natural language processing apps with computer vision implemented using Streamlit.

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries - (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii) Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce - namely COFAR. We make our code and dataset available at https://vl2g.github.io/projects/cofar

Over the last couple of years, the retail industry has been navigating against brutal headwinds: the worst pandemic in 100 years, global supply chain disruptions, and accelerating inflation -- all made worse by 1.1 million unfilled retail jobs. With a recession looming, retail businesses find themselves between a rock and a hard place. Still, every crisis brings about some positive changes. Retailers are discovering new strategies for customer service, supply chains, inventory management, pricing and promotion. They are preparing their brick-and-mortar stores for the digital age, reinventing legacy systems and beginning to tackle such advanced technologies as artificial intelligence (AI).