Comment by cmckn

I don’t understand the purpose of the Item Availability Model. If you’re getting inventory updates from a store at least once a day, can’t you use a more simple approach to stock prediction than a machine learning model? I.e. they can calculate the historic sale velocity of an item and with the current stock number decide whether the item will be there when the shopper arrives? They give the example of seasonal items, but if a customer tried to order egg nog in July, wouldn’t they have inventory data that the nog hasn’t been in stock for months? Maybe I’m overestimating the fidelity or completeness of the data they receive from retailers, and I guess ML is a way to do all this math without expressing it in code.