Food wholesales prediction : what is your baseline?

Sales prediction is an important problem for different companies involved in manufacturing, logistics, marketing, wholesaling and retailing. Different approaches have been suggested for food sales forecasting. Several researchers, including the authors of this paper, reported on the advantage of one type of technique over the others for a particular set of products. In this paper we demonstrate that besides an already recognized challenge of building accurate predictive models, the evaluation procedures themselves should be considered more carefully. We give illustrative examples to show that e.g. popular MAE and MSE estimates can be intuitive with one type of product and rather misleading with the others. Furthermore, averaging errors across differently behaving products can be also counter intuitive. We introduce new ways to evaluate the performance of wholesales prediction and discuss their biases with respect to different error types

Preface

This book discusses the challenges facing current research in knowledge discovery and data mining posed by the huge volumes of complex data now gathered in various real-world applications (e.g., business process monitoring, cybersecurity, medicine, language processing, and remote sensing). The book consists of 14 chapters covering the latest research by the authors and the research centers they represent. It illustrates techniques and algorithms that have recently been developed to preserve the richness of the data and allow us to efficiently and effectively identify the complex information it contains. Presenting the latest developments in complex pattern mining, this book is a valuable reference resource for data science researchers and professionals in academia and industry

A distance-based approach for action recommendation

Rule induction has attracted a great deal of attention in Machine Learning and Data Mining. However, generating rules is not an end in itself because their applicability is not so straightforward. Indeed, the user is often overwhelmed when faced with a large number of rules. In this paper, we propose an approach to lighten this burden when the user wishes to exploit such rules to decide which actions to do given an unsatisfactory situation. The method consists in comparing a situation to a set of classification rules. This is achieved using a suitable distance thus allowing to suggest action recommendations with minimal changes to improve that situation. We propose the algorithm Dakar for learning action recommendations and we present an application to an environmental protection issue. Our experiment shows the usefulness of our contribution in decision-making but also raises concerns about the impact of the redundancy of a set of rules in learning action recommendations of quality

Women'S Liberation And The Moral Individualism Of Ru

May Fourth Movement is often credited with women's liberation. Yet before the word "liberation" is overused, it is necessary to talk about what is behind this fabulous word. Chapter one will mainly discuss whether women needed such liberation and whether the May Fourth Movement really helped women to be liberated. The conclusion tries to argue that the May Fourth Movement did not liberate anyone. It simply changed people's way of living; women were the focus. After May Fourth Movement, Confucianism, ru as translated here, has experienced ups and downs, and reenters Chinese people's life, as both an ancient thought and a remodeled imported study. Chapter two tries to argue that ru cannot be taken as a pure religion, or mixed up with Marxism. Moral individualism within Confucianism is a practical philosophy. To better understand moral individualism within Confucianism, the best way is to go back to Confucian classics