neural networks and filePro

[Bill Vermillion]

On Tue, Nov 16 14:52 , Walter Vaughan moved his mouse, rebooted for the 
change to take effect, and then said:" 

> John Esak wrote:

> >>Has anyone fed their filePro derived order - line item data
> >>at a neural network to see any associations?

> >Do you mean _other_ than my own neural net?

> No. I'm really serious.

> Do customers order in patterns? Does the purchase of one item
> indicate the purchase of something later?

I'm imressed with the matching which is done by Amazon on
recommnedations - and my tastes are so widley scattered.

It inspired me to check what the recommendations are at this moment
and I see Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi in the recommend list.
I own those and it also listed Kurosawa's Dreams - which I also own
- and those aren't what you'd call mainstream - so they definately
are doing something right.

What I like about Amazon is they have a 'why was I recommended
this' - and one of the reasons was Kieslowski's Three Colors
trilogy.

About a year or so ago Sears was exapnding their data base of
customer purchases to be able to analyze purchases by a customer
and make recommendations.  One example was if something was
bought in kids swimming suits, and luggage bought by adults, they
might conclude a trip was in the offing and make offers for those.

They expected their database to go from 7 Terabytes to over
70 terabytes for that analysis ability.

Trends and tastes based on past purchases are proving to be valid
for at least some places.  

...

> Has anyone applied data they generated with filePro to a neural
> network to learn behavior?

But don't you have to analyze and give some criteria to each thing
bought to be able to make predictions?  To me that would be the
hardest part - doing the analysis of data - and not the
storing/collecting.

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com