Foresight Fall 2019 Issue Description
Executive Summary
- Foresight is the recommended forecasting journal of Brightwork Research & Analysis.
- Foresight has the following topics in its Fall 2019 issue.
Description
Fall 2019
Special Feature
Autonomous or “Lights Out” Supply-Chain Planning: What Niels van Hove requires new Technology
Analogous to the emergence of autonomous vehicles is the momentum toward autonomous supply-chain planning, given names such as “lights out” planning. Niels van Hove describes this development as the third wave of supply-chain planning, following the functionality in ERPs (first wave) and advanced planning software (second wave). But he argues that before the lights can be turned out—i.e. before human input can be eliminated— many technological hurdles must be overcome.
Our References for This Article
If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.
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Includes commentary, Close the Loop, Stabilize, and Respond, by Stefan de Kok
Articles
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Forecasting at Scale: The Architecture of a Modern Retail Forecasting System by Phillip Yelland, Zeynep Erkin Baz, and David Serafini
In this first of a three-part article, the authors in the Data Science/AI team at Target describe their team’s efforts to construct a demand forecasting system capable of efficiently generating the nearly one billion weekly forecasts required by the Target Corporation. They highlight the interplay of challenges arising in the contexts of statistical modeling, software engineering, and business practice and explain how the team surmounted obstacles in these three fields of knowledge. Subsequent parts of the article will address implementing the forecasting system and its maintenance in production. - Open-Source Forecasting Tools in Python by Tim Januschowski, Jan Gasthaus, and Yuyang Wang
The authors from Amazon Web Services have been heavily engaged in deep learning modeling and forecasting from neural networks. Their two-part tutorial and analysis of neural forecasting appeared in this journal’s summer and Fall 2018 issues. Here they review the state of open-source software options for forecasting, concentrating on alternative platforms to the R package. -
Continual Learning: The Next Generation of Artificial Intelligence by Daniel Philps
An introduction to automated machine learning and its possible next-generation realization, continual learning (CL). CL advances state-of-the-art by attempting to automatically learn different tasks while retaining knowledge from previous model implementations. This article presents an application of CL to investment decisions. It also offers the interesting perspective that complexity is not simply a technical characteristic of a model formulation but also a result of human judgment. - Book Review: Forecasting: An Essential Introduction, by Jennifer Castle, Michael Clements, and David Hendry; review by Michael Gilliland {free}
Brightwork’s Article Spotlight
Our favorite article in this edition of Foresight is the article Open-Source Forecasting Tools in Python. This article provides interesting information regarding Python (which happens to be the language we choose for our Brightwork Explorer). R and Python have become the go-to languages for analytics and a host of other functions. For those interested in what is happening with Python and forecasting, this can’t miss an article.