I've seen this twice now, and I just don't understand it. When calculating a "Finance Charge" for a fixed rate loan, applications make the user enter in all possible loan amounts and associated finance charges. Even though these rates are calculable (30%), they application makes the user fill out a table like this:
Loan Amount Finance Charge
100 30
105 31.5
etc, with the loan amounts being provided from $5 to $1500 in $5 increments.
We are starting a new initiative to rebuild this system. Is there a valid reason for doing a rate table this way? I would imagine that we should keep a simple interest field, and calculate it every time we need it.
I'm really at a loss as to why anyone would hardcode a table like that instead of calculating...I mean, computers are kind of designed to do stuff like this. Right?
It looks like compound interest where you're generously rounding up. The 100 case + 1 is pretty boring. But the 105 case + 1 is interesting.
T[0] = FC[105] => 31.5
T[1] = FC[136.5] => ?
Where does 136.5 hit -- 135 or 140? At 140, you've made an extra $1.05.
Or... If the rates were ever not calculable, that would be one reason for this implementation.
Or... The other reason (and one I would do if annoyed enough) would be that these rates were constantly changing, the developer got fed up with it, and he gave them an interface where the end users could set them on their own. The $5 buckets seem outrageous but maybe they were real jerks...
Related
For a project I am working on, which uses annual financial reports data (of multiple categories) from companies which have been successful or gone bust/into liquidation, I previously created a (fairly well performing) model on AWS Sagemaker using a multiple linear regression algorithm (specifically, the AWS stock algorithm for logistic regression/classification problems - the 'Linear Learner' algorithm)
This model just produces a simple "company is in good health" or "company looks like it will go bust" binary prediction, based on one set of annual data fed in; e.g.
query input: {data:[{
"Gross Revenue": -4000,
"Balance Sheet": 10000,
"Creditors": 4000,
"Debts": 1000000
}]}
inference output: "in good health" / "in bad health"
I trained this model by just ignoring what year for each company the values were from and pilling in all of the annual financial reports data (i.e. one years financial data for one company = one input line) for the training, along with the label of "good" or "bad" - a good company was one which has existed for a while, but hasn't gone bust, a bad company is one which was found to have eventually gone bust; e.g.:
label
Gross Revenue
Balance Sheet
Creditors
Debts
good
10000
20000
0
0
bad
0
5
100
10000
bad
20000
0
4
100000000
I hence used these multiple features (gross revenue, balance sheet...) along with the label (good/bad) in my training input, to create my first model.
I would like to use the same features as before as input (gross revenue, balance sheet..) but over multiple years; e.g take the values from 2020 & 2019 and use these (along with the eventual company status of "good" or "bad") as the singular input for my new model. However I'm unsure of the following:
is this an inappropriate use of logistic regression Machine learning? i.e. is there a more suitable algorithm I should consider?
is it fine, or terribly wrong to try and just use the same technique as before, but combine the data for both years into one input line like:
label
Gross Revenue(2019)
Balance Sheet(2019)
Creditors(2019)
Debts(2019)
Gross Revenue(2020)
Balance Sheet(2020)
Creditors(2020)
Debts(2020)
good
10000
20000
0
0
30000
10000
40
500
bad
100
50
200
50000
100
5
100
10000
bad
5000
0
2000
800000
2000
0
4
100000000
I would personally expect that a company which has gotten worse over time (i.e. companies finances are worse in 2020 than in 2019) should be more likely to be found to be a "bad"/likely to go bust, so I would hope that, if I feed in data like in the above example (i.e. earlier years data comes before later years data, on an input line) my training job ends up creating a model which gives greater weighting to the earlier years data, when making predictions
Any advice or tips would be greatly appreciated - I'm pretty new to machine learning and would like to learn more
UPDATE:
Using Long-Short-Term-Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM RNN) is one potential route I think I could try taking, but this seems to commonly just be used with multivariate data over many dates; my data only has 2 or 3 dates worth of multivariate data, per company. I would want to try using the data I have for all the companies, over the few dates worth of data there are, in training
I once developed a so called Genetic Time Series in R. I used a Genetic Algorithm which sorted out the best solutions from multivariate data, which were fitted on a VAR in differences or a VECM. Your data seems more macro economic or financial than user-centric and VAR or VECM seems appropriate. (Surely it is possible to treat time-series data in the same way so that we can use LSTM or other approaches, but these are very common) However, I do not know if VAR in differences or VECM works with binary classified labels. Perhaps if you would calculate a metric outcome, which you later label encode to a categorical feature (or label it first to a categorical) than VAR or VECM may also be appropriate.
However you may add all yearly data points to one data points per firm to forecast its survival, but you would loose a lot of insight. If you are interested in time series ML which works a little bit different than for neural networks or elastic net (which could also be used with time series) let me know. And we can work something out. Or I'll paste you some sources.
Summary:
1.)
It is possible to use LSTM, elastic NEt (time points may be dummies or treated as cross sectional panel) or you use VAR in differences and VECM with a slightly different out come variable
2.)
It is possible but you will loose information over time.
All the best,
Patrick
I'm importing text items to Google's AutoML. Each row contains around 5000 characters and I'm adding 70K of these rows. This is a multi-label data set. There is no progress bar or indication of how long this process will take. Its been running for a couple of hours. Is there any way to calculate time remaining or total estimated time. I'd like to add additional data sets, but I'm worried that this will be a very long process before the training even begins. Any sort of formula to create even a semi-wild guess would be great.
-Thanks!
I don't think that's possible today, but I filed a feature request [1] that you can follow for updates. I asked for both training and importing data, as for training it could be useful too.
I tried training with 50K records (~ 300 bytes/record) and the load took more than 20 mins after which I killed it. I retried with 1K, which ran for 20 mins and then emailed me an error message saying I had multiple labels per input (yes, so what? training data is going to have some of those) and I had >100 labels. I simplified the classification buckets and re-ran. It took another 20 mins and was successful. Then I ran 'training' which took 3 hours and billed me $11. That maps to $550 for 50K recs, assuming linear behavior. The prediction results were not bad for a first pass, but I got the feeling that it is throwing a super large neural net at the problem. Would help if they said what NN it was and its dimensions. They do say "beta" :)
don't wast your time trying to using google for text classification. I am a GCP hard user but microsoft LUIS is far better, precise and so much faster that I can't believe that both products are trying to solve same problem.
Luis has a much better documentation, support more languages, has a much better test interface, way faster.. I don't know if is cheaper yet because the pricing model is different but we are willing to pay more.
I'm using the AWS Machine Learning regression to predict the waiting time in a line of a restaurant, in a specific weekday/time.
Today I have around 800k data.
Example Data:
restaurantID (rowID)weekDay (categorical)time (categorical)tablePeople (numeric)waitingTime (numeric - target)1 sun 21:29 2 23
2 fri 20:13 4 43
...
I have two questions:
1)
Should I use time as Categorical or Numeric?
It's better to split into two fields: minutes and seconds?
2)
I would like in the same model to get the predictions for all my restaurants.
Example:
I expected to send the rowID identifier and it returns different predictions, based on each restaurant data (ignoring others data).
I tried, but it's returning the same prediction for any rowID. Why?
Should I have a model for each restaurant?
There are several problems with the way you set-up your model
1) Time in the form you have it should never be categorical. Your model treats times 12:29 and 12:30 as two completely independent attributes. So it will never use facts it learn about 12:29 to predict what's going to happen at 12:30. In your case you either should set time to be numeric. Not sure if amazon ML can convert it for you automatically. If not just multiply hour by 60 and add minutes to it. Another interesting thing to do is to bucketize your time, by selecting which half hour or wider interval. You do it by dividing (h*60+m) by some number depending how many buckets you want. So to try 120 to get 2 hr intervals. Generally the more data you have the smaller intervals you can have. The key is to have a lot of samples in each bucket.
2) You should really think about removing restaurantID from your input data. Having it there will cause the model to over-fit on it. So it will not be able to make predictions about restaurant with id:5 based on the facts it learn from restaurants with id:3 or id:9. Having restaurant id there might be okay if you have a lot of data about each restaurant and you don't care about extrapolating your predictions to the restaurants that are not in the training set.
3) You never send restaurantID to predict data about it. The way it usually works you need to pick what are you trying to predict. In your case probably 'waitingTime' is most useful attribute. So you need to send weekDay, time and number of people and the model will output waiting time.
You should think what is relevant for the prediction to be accurate, and you should use your domain expertise to define the features/attributes you need to have in your data.
For example, time of the day, is not just a number. From my limited understanding in restaurant, I would drop the minutes, and only focus on the hours.
I would certainly create a model for each restaurant, as the popularity of the restaurant or the type of food it is serving is having an impact on the wait time. With Amazon ML it is easy to create many models as you can build the model using the SDK, and even schedule retraining of the models using AWS Lambda (that mean automatically).
I'm not sure what the feature called tablePeople means, but a general recommendation is to have as many as possible relevant features, to get better prediction. For example, month or season is probably important as well.
In contrast with some answers to this post, I think resturantID helps and it actually gives valuable information. If you have a significant amount of data per each restaurant then you can train a model per each restaurant and get a good accuracy, but if you don't have enough data then resturantID is very informative.
1) Just imagine what if you had only two columns in your dataset: restaurantID and waitingTime. Then wouldn't you think the restaurantID from the testing data helps you to find a rough waiting time? In the simplest implementation, your waiting time per each restaurantID would be the average of waitingTime. So definitely restaurantID is a valuable information. Now that you have more features in your dataset, you need to check if restaurantID is as effective as the other features or not.
2) If you decide to keep restaurantID then you must use it as a categorical string. It should be a non-parametric feature in your dataset and maybe that's why you did not get a proper result.
On the issue with day and time I agree with other answers and considering that you are building your model for the restaurant, hourly time may give a more accurate result.
I have a bit of a unique problem here. I currently have two warehouses that I ship items out of for selling on Amazon, my primary warehouse and my secondary warehouse. Shipping out of the secondary warehouse takes significantly longer than shipping from the main warehouse, hence why it is referred to as the "secondary" warehouse.
Some of our inventory is split between the two warehouses. Usually this is not an issue, but we keep having a particular issue. Allow me to explain:
Let's say that I have 10 red cups in the main warehouse, and an additional 300 in the secondary warehouse. Let's also say it's Christmas time, so I have all 310 listed. However, from what I've seen, Amazon only allows one shipping time to be listed for the inventory, so the entire 310 get listed as under the primary warehouse's shipping time (2 days) and doesn't account for the secondary warehouse's ship time, rather than split the way that they should be, 10 at 2 days and 300 at 15 days.
The problem comes in when someone orders an amount that would have to be split across the two warehouses, such as if someone were to order 12 of said red cups. The first 10 would come out of the primary warehouse, and the remaining two would come out of the secondary warehouse. Due to the secondary warehouse's shipping time, the remaining two cups would have to be shipped out at a significantly different date, but Amazon marks the entire order as needing to be shipped within those two days.
For a variety of reasons, it is not practical to keep all of one product in one warehouse, nor is it practical to increase the secondary warehouse's shipping time. Changing the overall shipping date for the product to the longest ship time causes us to lose the buy box for the listing, which really defeats the purpose of us trying to sell it.
So my question is this: is there some way in MWS to indicate that the inventory is split up in terms of shipping times? If so, how?
Any assistance in this matter would be appreciated.
Short answer: No.
There is no way to specify two values for FulfillmentLatency, in the same way as there is no way to specify two values for Quantity in stock. You can only ever have one inventory with them (plus FBA stock)
Longer answer: You could.
Sign up twice with Amazon:
"MySellerName" has an inventory of 10 and a fulfillment latency of 2 days
"MySellerName Overseas Warehouse" has an inventory of 300 and a fulfillment latency of 30 days
I haven't tried by I believe Amazon will then automatically direct the customer to the best seller for them, which should be "MySellerName" for small orders and "MySellerName Overseas Warehouse" for larger quantities.
I want to create a 5 reels slot machine calculation system and I'm not sure what approach to take.
I understand that there is a lot of math within it, especially if I want the machine to be enjoyable to a player.
Are there any tips/links for that? Was looking for info at the web but they discuss on it from the player's perspective rather than the developer's perspective, in all cases I've found.
Just to make it clear; I'm not after the user interface stuff, but only after the internal machine's payout calculation, which will make sure the house gets a revenue while maintaining good playability.
Programming language would be C++, yet I'm fine with others.
As Phong noted, you need to first determine what the overall, long-term payout of the machine should be. e.g. $0.95 for every $1.
You then look at all your winning combinations, the odds of that combination occurring, and the payout of that combination. Add them all together and it should be equal to your desired long term payout.
The trick then is to balance the combinations so you have a few ones that are easy to hit, and pay low, to keep payouts happening every so often, and a one that is very hard to hit, but pays high, so there's always the chance of a big payout.
It's really all about design and maths, rather than implementation and coding.
Quick example of the maths: If you had a 3 reel machine with 10 slots (call them A-J) on each reel, and you wanted to payout $0.95 for every dollar long term, then you might have:
AAA - odds 0.001 - pays $500 - expected payout - $0.50
A-- - odds 0.100 - pays $3 - expected payout - $0.30
B-- - odds 0.100 - pays $1.50 - expected payout - $0.15
You need to first define:
On how much money played, how much do
you want to keep, and how much the
player can win.
On a win, how much do you want the user to win (eg: 5$ to 1000$)
after that then you need to geenrate a random function which will have a correspond to your spec (win loose). and (how much to money to get)
You need to check if the result is ok with the current state of the machine It is still random... so it avoid having too much win/loose. (anybody did see a machine loosing money yet ??? :) )