Thought Experiments in the Browser Stitch Fix Technology – Multithreaded

As data scientists, we work in concert with other members of an organization with the goal of making better decisions. This often involves finding trends and anomalies in historical data to guide future action. But in some cases, the best aid to decision-making is less about finding "the answer" in the data and more about developing a deeper understanding of the underlying problem. In this post we will focus another tool that is often overlooked: interactive simulations through the means of agent based modeling. Agent based modeling involves the description of individual agents that interact with each other within an environment and seeing how their behaviours combine to produce macro-level system behaviours. Agents can be modeled at whatever level seems natural to our understanding of the system: individual humans, client cohorts, departments, competing firms, computer programs or similar entities can all be agents.