

Predicting Customer Pregnancy At Target (How We Would Do It) - pospischil
http://blog.custora.com/2012/02/how-we-would-do-it-predicting-customer-pregnancy-at-target/

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radikalus
I'd imagine tanimoto or cosine similarity would get you most of the way there
while being very off-the-shelf.

If you're going to go the route of binary classification, I'd personally do it
via RFs as variable importance (product importance) is built in. (But that's
just personal pref)

I think that it's a solid step-by-step thought process on tackling the problem
-- I'd probably think of the false positive vs false negative in terms of the
relative expected values of success/failure in those classifications. (And
perhaps cost-sensitivity could even be added to your original classifier --
perhaps if you had a forest of 500 trees, and you get even 100 votes for
pregnant, that's enough to decide to send a pregnancy-targeted mailer)

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jackalope
After watching a coworker innocently ask a woman who wasn't expecting, "When
are you due?", I've developed a simple rule for this:

If she tells you she's pregnant: _Congratulate her._

If she doesn't: _Keep your mouth shut._

Seriously, if you want to target expectant mothers, let them register for a
discount program. _Diapers are expensive!_ Any marketing effort that begins,
"We think you might be pregnant..." is doomed.

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ceejayoz
Not much real content here. Feels like a rather crass attempt to capitalize on
the buzz around the Target story.

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unreal37
I don't know if crass is the right word. It's opportunistic I guess, but this
is how the world of marketing works -- a story about something similar to what
you do catches the Internet's brief attention, and you put your hand up and
say, hey me too!

