this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.