• TheGreenGolem@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 months ago

    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.

    • kromem@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.