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A variation of the Minority Game has been applied to study the timing of promotional actions at retailers in the fast moving consumer goods market. The underlying hypotheses for this work are that price promotions are more effective when…
Data competitions rely on real-time leaderboards to rank competitor entries and stimulate algorithm improvement. While such competitions have become quite popular and prevalent, particularly in supervised learning formats, their…
In this study, we introduced various statistical performance metrics, based on the pinball loss and the empirical coverage, for the ranking of probabilistic forecasting models. We tested the ability of the proposed metrics to determine the…
Consider a customer who needs to fulfill a shopping list, and also a personal shopper who is willing to buy and resell to customers the goods in their shopping lists. It is in the personal shopper's best interest to find (shopping) routes…
Multi-step ahead forecasting is still an open challenge in time series forecasting. Several approaches that deal with this complex problem have been proposed in the literature but an extensive comparison on a large number of tasks is still…
We consider online scheduling on multiple machines for jobs arriving one-by-one with the objective of minimizing the makespan. For any number of identical parallel or uniformly related machines, we provide a competitive-ratio approximation…
Digital health technologies enable high-frequency collection of data in near-continuous time and capture rich information about the health of individuals. The raw data collected by these devices often have a hierarchical functional…
The growing popularity of Virtual Assistants poses new challenges for Entity Resolution, the task of linking mentions in text to their referent entities in a knowledge base. Specifically, in the shopping domain, customers tend to use…
We present a framework for computing with input data specified by intervals, representing uncertainty in the values of the input parameters. To compute a solution, the algorithm can query the input parameters that yield more refined…
Different from shopping at retail stores, consumers on e-commerce platforms usually cannot touch or try products before purchasing, which means that they have to make decisions when they are uncertain about the outcome (e.g., satisfaction…
Machine Learning (ML) models trained on data from multiple demographic groups can inherit representation disparity (Hashimoto et al., 2018) that may exist in the data: the model may be less favorable to groups contributing less to the…
In electricity markets, retailers or brokers want to maximize profits by allocating tariff profiles to end consumers. One of the objectives of such demand response management is to incentivize the consumers to adjust their consumption so…
In this paper, we consider the problem of modelling historical data on retail credit portfolio performance, with a view to forecasting future performance, and facilitating strategic decision making. We consider a situation, common in…
We address classification of distributional data, where units are described by histogram or interval-valued variables. The proposed approach uses a linear discriminant function where distributions or intervals are represented by quantile…
With the expansion of operational scale of supermarkets in China, the vegetable market has grown considerably. The decision-making related to procurement costs and allocation quantities of vegetables has become a pivotal factor in…
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…
A central question in multi-agent strategic games deals with learning the underlying utilities driving the agents' behaviour. Motivated by the increasing availability of large data-sets, we develop an unifying data-driven technique to…
This paper represents the metaheuristics proposed for solving a class of Shop Scheduling problem. The Bacterial Foraging Optimization algorithm is featured with Ant Colony Optimization algorithm and proposed as a natural inspired computing…
Demand forecasting is a central component of the replenishment process for retailers, as it provides crucial input for subsequent decision making like ordering processes. In contrast to point estimates, such as the conditional mean of the…
Demand forecasting in competitive, uncertain business environments requires models that can integrate multiple evaluation perspectives rather than being restricted to hyperparameter optimization based on a single metric. This traditional…