Cross Validated Asked by doxav on January 14, 2021
In order to track prices of many different products from different sources, I must optimally schedule a group of trackers dedicated to price collection (ie. collect one price at a time for each product per source). The goal is to be always aware of the current price of each product-source despite the limited number of trackers. A price may change rarely (ie. 8 hours) or be more volatile (ie. 20 minutes) depending on the product, context, source… It’s not possible to fetch prices every minute of all products from each source, it would require far too much trackers in parallel and it would be worthless (many prices do not change for a while).
Here come the optimization problem. How can I optimally schedule/update the trackers’ job queue in real-time in order to:
My current simple solution is to maintain different online time series ML models (combine prediction from a local model for each product-source and a global model of all products-sources) in order to get the probability each price would change within the next X minutes. This prediction output requires the latest features available for each product-source. Its a binary classification problem based on time-series. A similar model would be to predict how much a price should change within the next X minutes, it is then a regression problem similar to the probability from the classification problem but it would prioritize important price changes.
The age of features for a product-source may be old so the prediction must be linked to their age. This age can mean that features are outdated but mainly how likely it will change soon (ie. “25 minutes ago, probability of change within 30 minutes was 90%” > “1 minute ago, probability of change within was 90%”).
Then I use this simple score: (probability of change within X minutes threshold) x (age of features in minutes / X minutes threshold).
So I arrange the price collection queue as follows: Y% of prices ranked by top change score, Z% of prices ordered by oldest collection request first. Z should be as small as possible but still guarantee that old prices will always be collected. There’s a min interval filter for a new collection request on a same price.
Two questions:
Thanks a lot for any help.
Xavier
From my experience in the beer business I would make the following observations:
This could simplify your optimization to sampling only those stores and items that are commonly promoted. You might also look in newspapers for feature ads. These are usually published a day before the promotion.
Answered by Fred Andres on January 14, 2021
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