Latest AI Research at Amazon Improves Forecasting by Learning the Quantile Functions

'The quantile function is a mathematical function that takes a quantile (a percentage of a distribution ranging from 0 to 1) as an input and returns the value of a variable as an output.' It can answer queries such as, "How much inventory do I need to maintain on hand if I want to guarantee that 95 percent of my customers receive their orders within 24 hours?" As a result, the quantile function is frequently utilized in forecasting questions. However, in practice, there is rarely a neat method for computing the quantile function. That means that if you want to compute it for a different quantile, you'll need to create a new regression model, which nowadays usually entails retraining a neural network.