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We keep getting ads for the thing we bought yesterday This does not demonstrate that the machine learning algorithms are doing a bad job. Quite the opposite re

• saghm 7y ago
  2% of households returning their refrigerators and buying a new one seems pretty high, although I don't have any data to back this up. How many people reading this have made multiple (separate) refrigerator purchases in a week?
• smsm42 7y ago
  With arbitrary assumptions about statistics, you can "statistically prove" pretty much anything. Until the 2% figure is substantiated, it's all baloney.
  • harryh 7y ago
    There's also the fact that advertisers spend many millions of dollars buying these ads, so they have a pretty large financial incentive to do it well.
    • smsm42 7y ago
      You are assuming there's a way to do it well and not well, but what if nobody actually knows how it is - doing it well? What if marketing is just given a budget of X million dollars to spend on advertising, but nobody there actually knows whether doing X or Y works, but they know everybody does X, so if they do X, there's no chance they'd be fired for that?