Machine Learning, Big Data and Black Friday

The U.S. has many rituals that define the progress of the year, some quite traditional like Christmas and Thanksgiving, and some with an air of shared ridiculousness like Black Friday. It is now a deep-seated American tradition to revel in the shared gluttony and community of Thanksgiving and then exercise those calories off the next day in the way we Americans know best - shopping! The term Black Friday comes from 1950's Philadelphia to describe the barely controlled chaos of thousands who poured into the city for the Army-Navy game the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Since the 80's, the world has changed, particularly in the world of retail, in which the shopper has changed as much as the shopping center, with technology playing a massive role in those changes. For example, in I the past couple of years, Big Data and Machine Learning have gone from being fringe technologies to must-haves.