Managing discount promotional events ("markdown") is a significant part of running an e-commerce business, and inefficiencies here can significantly hamper a retailer's profitability. Traditional approaches for tackling this problem rely heavily on price elasticity modelling. However, the partial information nature of price elasticity modelling, together with the non-negotiable responsibility for protecting profitability, mean that machine learning practitioners must often go through great lengths to define strategies for measuring offline model quality. In the face of this, many retailers fall back on rule-based methods, thus forgoing significant gains in profitability that can be captured by machine learning. In this paper, we introduce two novel end-to-end markdown management systems for optimising markdown at different stages of a retailer's journey. The first system, "Ithax", enacts a rational supply-side pricing strategy without demand estimation, and can be usefully deployed as a "cold start" solution to collect markdown data while maintaining revenue control. The second system, "Promotheus", presents a full framework for markdown optimization with price elasticity. We describe in detail the specific modelling and validation procedures that, within our experience, have been crucial to building a system that performs robustly in the real world. Both markdown systems achieve superior profitability compared to decisions made by our experienced operations teams in a controlled online test, with improvements of 86% (Promotheus) and 79% (Ithax) relative to manual strategies. These systems have been deployed to manage markdown at ASOS.com, and both systems can be fruitfully deployed for price optimization across a wide variety of retail e-commerce settings.

The electricity consumption of buildings composes a major part of the city's energy consumption. Electricity consumption forecasting enables the development of home energy management systems resulting in the future design of more sustainable houses and a decrease in total energy consumption. Energy performance in buildings is influenced by many factors like ambient temperature, humidity, and a variety of electrical devices. Therefore, multivariate prediction methods are preferred rather than univariate. The Honda Smart Home US data set was selected to compare three methods for minimizing forecasting errors, MAE and RMSE: Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Regression, and Fuzzy Rule-Based Systems for Regression by constructing many models for each method on a multivariate data set in different time terms. The comparison shows that SVR is a superior method over the alternatives.

Near the entire university faculty directors must select some qualified professors for respected courses in each academic semester. In this sense, factors such as teaching experience, academic training, competition, etc. are considered. This work is usually done by experts, such as faculty directors, which is time consuming. Up to now, several semi-automatic systems have been proposed to assist heads. In this article, a fully automatic rule-based expert system is developed. The proposed expert system consists of three main stages. First, the knowledge of human experts is entered and designed as a decision tree. In the second step, an expert system is designed based on the provided rules of the generated decision tree. In the third step, an algorithm is proposed to weight the results of the tree based on the quality of the experts. To improve the performance of the expert system, a majority voting algorithm is developed as a post-process step to select the qualified trainer who satisfies the most expert decision tree for each course. The quality of the proposed expert system is evaluated using real data from Iranian universities. The calculated accuracy rate is 85.55, demonstrating the robustness and accuracy of the proposed system. The proposed system has little computational complexity compared to related efficient works. Also, simple implementation and transparent box are other features of the proposed system.

Intelligent analysis and visualization of tables use techniques to automatically recommend useful knowledge from data, thus freeing users from tedious multi-dimension data mining. While many studies have succeeded in automating recommendations through rules or machine learning, it is difficult to generalize expert knowledge and provide explainable recommendations. In this paper, we present the recommendation of conditional formatting for the first time, together with chart recommendation, to exemplify intelligent table analysis. We propose analytical semantics over tables to uncover common analysis pattern behind user-created analyses. Here, we design analytical semantics by separating data focus from user intent, which extract the user motivation from data and human perspective respectively. Furthermore, the ASTA framework is designed by us to apply analytical semantics to multiple automated recommendations. ASTA framework extracts data features by designing signatures based on expert knowledge, and enables data referencing at field- (chart) or cell-level (conditional formatting) with pre-trained models. Experiments show that our framework achieves recall at top 1 of 62.86% on public chart corpora, outperforming the best baseline about 14%, and achieves 72.31% on the collected corpus ConFormT, validating that ASTA framework is effective in providing accurate and explainable recommendations.

"If we really want to build a machine on the verge of human-level intelligence, we need to ditch current statistical and data-driven learning paradigm in favour of a causal-based approach." In the 1970s and early 1980s, computer scientists believed that the manipulation of symbols provided a priori by humans was sufficient for computer systems to exhibit intelligence and solve seemingly hard problems. This hypothesis came to be known as the symbol-rule hypothesis. However, despite some initial encouraging progress, such as computer chess and theorem proving, it soon became apparent that rule-based systems could not solve problems that appear seemingly simple to humans. "It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance […] and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old".

Norms help regulate a society. Norms may be explicit (represented in structured form) or implicit. We address the emergence of explicit norms by developing agents who provide and reason about explanations for norm violations in deciding sanctions and identifying alternative norms. These agents use a genetic algorithm to produce norms and reinforcement learning to learn the values of these norms. We find that applying explanations leads to norms that provide better cohesion and goal satisfaction for the agents. Our results are stable for societies with differing attitudes of generosity.

The importance of building text-to-SQL parsers which can be applied to new databases has long been acknowledged, and a critical step to achieve this goal is schema linking, i.e., properly recognizing mentions of unseen columns or tables when generating SQLs. In this work, we propose a novel framework to elicit relational structures from large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a probing procedure based on Poincar\'e distance metric, and use the induced relations to augment current graph-based parsers for better schema linking. Compared with commonly-used rule-based methods for schema linking, we found that probing relations can robustly capture semantic correspondences, even when surface forms of mentions and entities differ. Moreover, our probing procedure is entirely unsupervised and requires no additional parameters. Extensive experiments show that our framework sets new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks. We empirically verify that our probing procedure can indeed find desired relational structures through qualitative analysis. Our code can be found at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI.

Justification theory [3] is a unifying theory to capture semantics of non-monotonic logics. Largely thanks to its abstract nature, it is a powerful framework with many use cases. First, it provides a mechanism to define new logics based on well-known principles in a uniform way, as well as to transfer results between domains. Second, it brings order in the zoo of logics and semantics, by enabling a systematic comparison between multiple semantics for a single logic and between different logics, for instance by answering the question whether a certain semantics of a given logic coincides with a semantics of another logic.

PHOENIX and LAS VEGAS, Aug. 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today at Inman Connect Las Vegas, Chime Technologies, an award-winning real estate technology innovator, introduced the company's latest natively-built platform capability, Social Studio. Designed to help real estate professionals capitalize on social media as a low-cost opportunity to build awareness and fill their pipeline, Social Studio automates the creation and execution of organic social media posts directly from the Chime system. Agents no longer need to spend countless hours developing engaging content; Social Studio provides the automation needed to streamline social media marketing efforts. To learn more, watch our video. The Chime team will be conducting demos of Social Studio and showcasing the full breadth and depth of the platform's lead generation, nurture, and conversion capabilities at Inman Connect this week.

The approaches by which the machine learning and clinical research communities utilize real world data (RWD), including data captured in the electronic health record (EHR), vary dramatically. While clinical researchers cautiously use RWD for clinical investigations, ML for healthcare teams consume public datasets with minimal scrutiny to develop new algorithms. This study bridges this gap by developing and validating ML-DQA, a data quality assurance framework grounded in RWD best practices. The ML-DQA framework is applied to five ML projects across two geographies, different medical conditions, and different cohorts. A total of 2,999 quality checks and 24 quality reports were generated on RWD gathered on 247,536 patients across the five projects. Five generalizable practices emerge: all projects used a similar method to group redundant data element representations; all projects used automated utilities to build diagnosis and medication data elements; all projects used a common library of rules-based transformations; all projects used a unified approach to assign data quality checks to data elements; and all projects used a similar approach to clinical adjudication. An average of 5.8 individuals, including clinicians, data scientists, and trainees, were involved in implementing ML-DQA for each project and an average of 23.4 data elements per project were either transformed or removed in response to ML-DQA. This study demonstrates the importance role of ML-DQA in healthcare projects and provides teams a framework to conduct these essential activities.