Retail
Optimization of Deep Learning Models for Dynamic Market Behavior Prediction
Zhao, Shenghan, Lin, Yuzhen, Yang, Ximeng, Lu, Qiaochu, Xue, Haozhong, Jiang, Gaozhe
The advent of financial technology has witnessed a surge in the utilization of deep learning models to anticipate consumer conduct, a trend that has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing lending strategies and bolstering market efficiency. We study multi-horizon demand forecasting on e-commerce transactions using the UCI Online Retail II dataset. Unlike prior versions of this manuscript that mixed financial-loan narratives with retail data, we focus exclusively on retail market behavior and define a clear prediction target: per SKU daily demand (or revenue) for horizons H=1,7,14. We present a hybrid sequence model that combines multi-scale temporal convolutions, a gated recurrent module, and time-aware self-attention. The model is trained with standard regression losses and evaluated under MAE, RMSE, sMAPE, MASE, and Theil's U_2 with strict time-based splits to prevent leakage. We benchmark against ARIMA/Prophet, LSTM/GRU, LightGBM, and state-of-the-art Transformer forecasters (TFT, Informer, Autoformer, N-BEATS). Results show consistent accuracy gains and improved robustness on peak/holiday periods. We further provide ablations and statistical significance tests to ensure the reliability of improvements, and we release implementation details to facilitate reproducibility.
What Bigfoot hunters get right (and very wrong)
'Bigfooters' often employ credible scientific methods in their searches. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Bigfoot remains firmly in the realm of cryptozoology, along with the likes of the Loch Ness monster . However, its pursuers often are not the stereotypical crackpots depicted across pop culture. According to two social scientists, they frequently rely on widely accepted, reliable methods and tools to search for the elusive Sasquatch.
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55 Best Early Black Friday Deals on WIRED-Tested Gear (2025)
We found early Black Friday deals on WIRED-tested smart bird feeders, smartwatches, vacuums, and more. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping holidays of the year. Falling on the Friday and Monday after Thanksgiving, it's safe to expect Black Friday deals on thousands of items big and small. As always, the WIRED Reviews team will be scouring the internet to find truly good deals on items we've actually hand-tested and would recommend to a friend. While the official sales have not yet started, there are already some great early discounts on reliable gear.
OpenAI Locks Down San Francisco Offices Following Alleged Threat From Activist
A message on OpenAI's internal Slack claimed the activist in question had expressed interest in "causing physical harm to OpenAI employees." OpenAI employees in San Francisco were told to stay inside the office on Friday afternoon after the company purportedly received a threat from an individual who was previously associated with the Stop AI activist group. "Our information indicates that [name] from StopAI has expressed interest in causing physical harm to OpenAI employees," a member of the internal communications team wrote on Slack. "He has previously been on site at our San Francisco facilities." Just before 11 am, San Francisco police received a 911 call about a man allegedly making threats and intending to harm others at 550 Terry Francois Boulevard, which is near OpenAI's offices in the Mission Bay neighborhood, according to data tracked by the crime app Citizen.
MediaWorld Accidentally Sold iPads for 15 and Asked for Them Back: "It Was a Clear Mistake"
The incredible offer appeared to loyalty card holders of the European electronics chain on November 8. After 11 days the company began contacting buyers, calling it a clear mistake. Italian electronics retailer MediaWorld has scrambled to fix a world-historic iPad pricing error. On November 8, an offer for loyalty card holders appeared on the website of MediaWorld, a European electronics retailer. No catch, no strings attached.
Hiker stumbles on massive medieval reindeer traps in Norway
The 1,500-year-old site was hidden beneath the dark, damp ice. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In the fall of 2024, a hiker named Helge Titland was trekking through Aurlandsfjellet, a mountainous region and plateau in Norway and got a little more than just some time with nature. Titland found some strange wooden stakes peaking out of melting snow. He wisely reported it to local archaeologists, but snow returned before the team could investigate.
Dynamic Revenue Sharing
Many online platforms act as intermediaries between a seller and a set of buyers. Examples of such settings include online retailers (such as Ebay) selling items on behalf of sellers to buyers, or advertising exchanges (such as AdX) selling pageviews on behalf of publishers to advertisers. In such settings, revenue sharing is a central part of running such a marketplace for the intermediary, and fixed-percentage revenue sharing schemes are often used to split the revenue among the platform and the sellers. In particular, such revenue sharing schemes require the platform to (i) take at most a constant fraction \alpha of the revenue from auctions and (ii) pay the seller at least the seller declared opportunity cost c for each item sold. A straightforward way to satisfy the constraints is to set a reserve price at c / (1 - \alpha) for each item, but it is not the optimal solution on maximizing the profit of the intermediary.
Break out the calculators: November 23 is Fibonacci Sequence Day
The cornerstone of modern math wouldn't be possible without the Hindu-Arabic numerical system. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Most people know about Pi Day (3/14), but there are even rarer days on the calendar like Pythagorean Triple Square Day (9/16/25). The poetry of mathematics manifests everywhere in nature, but few numerical patterns are more common than the Fibonacci Sequence . First described in 1202 by mathematician Italian Leonardo Bonacci (Fibonacci is a shortening of or "son of Bonacci"), the concept involves adding 1 and 1 together, then doing the same for every successive pair of numbers.
Efficient Second-Order Online Kernel Learning with Adaptive Embedding
Online kernel learning (OKL) is a flexible framework to approach prediction problems, since the large approximation space provided by reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces can contain an accurate function for the problem. Nonetheless, optimizing over this space is computationally expensive. Not only first order methods accumulate $\O(\sqrt{T})$ more loss than the optimal function, but the curse of kernelization results in a $\O(t)$ per step complexity. Second-order methods get closer to the optimum much faster, suffering only $\O(\log(T))$ regret, but second-order updates are even more expensive, with a $\O(t^2)$ per-step cost. Existing approximate OKL methods try to reduce this complexity either by limiting the Support Vectors (SV) introduced in the predictor, or by avoiding the kernelization process altogether using embedding.