But you actually need vision because purchase history is not indicative of my future purchases. Sometimes I buy butter and eat it in a 3 days and buy again. Sometimes I’m not in the mood and have a chunk of butter to sit in my fridge for 3 weeks. It’s honestly totally random for a lot of things. It depends only on my mood at the moment.
You’d be surprised at how many of those things you think are random would actually emerge as a pattern in long enough purchase history data.
For example, it might be that there’s a seasonality to your being in the mood. Or other things you’d have brought a week before, etc.
Over a decade ago a model looking only at purchase history for Target was able to tell a teenage girl was pregnant before her family knew just by things like switching from scented candles to unscented.
There’s more modeled in that data than simply what’s on the receipt.
But you actually need vision because purchase history is not indicative of my future purchases. Sometimes I buy butter and eat it in a 3 days and buy again. Sometimes I’m not in the mood and have a chunk of butter to sit in my fridge for 3 weeks. It’s honestly totally random for a lot of things. It depends only on my mood at the moment.
You’d be surprised at how many of those things you think are random would actually emerge as a pattern in long enough purchase history data.
For example, it might be that there’s a seasonality to your being in the mood. Or other things you’d have brought a week before, etc.
Over a decade ago a model looking only at purchase history for Target was able to tell a teenage girl was pregnant before her family knew just by things like switching from scented candles to unscented.
There’s more modeled in that data than simply what’s on the receipt.