well done. good on your workplace for setting up a competition to benchmark competing solutions & good on you for learning how to do it yourself. > there are a

well done. good on your workplace for setting up a competition to benchmark competing solutions & good on you for learning how to do it yourself. > there are an awful lot of business problems can be solved with 'good enough' solutions with relatively simple, undergrad level algorithms and good domain knowledge i agree. also, the subsystem making predictions is but one part of the overall system, and the performance of the overall system is often most impacted by the weakest link in the chain. this might not be the predictions, it might be data quality, or how well the system can execute on the output of the predictions. in some sense this is freeing --- it can be incredibly challenging - or perhaps impossible - to make "optimal" decisions, but in a lot of places there's value in just doing a good enough job.