6 Ways Machine Learning Will Impact Ecommerce

Machine learning is a discipline aimed at having computers discover patterns or trends in some set of data without being explicitly programmed to recognize the pattern or trend. A counter example will help to explain the technique. Target is famous in the retail industry for having employed statisticians and data scientists to use purchase behavior to identify shoppers who were pregnant and then market to them. Presumably, those statisticians and data scientists used data from Target's baby registry system to identify pregnancy-driven buying patterns. These patterns were then used to write algorithms that could identify pregnant shoppers and offer discounts or coupons that were likely to make that shopper more loyal to Target.