See this thread by patio11 for a good explanation as to why this isn't as dumb as it looks: mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/98220…

Nah, this is definitely not evidence of brokenness. People rebuy things they've bought recently all the time, certainly more often than the general population. Maybe they want a 2nd one. Maybe the 1st one broke. Maybe they liked it so much they want a 2nd one to give as a gift. All kinds of reasons. patio11 has a great tweetstream on this issue. twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057…

> You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!" Patrick explained it why it might be like so: mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/98220… (thread: threadreaderapp.com/thread/982208307057… ) > I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Amazon does various forms of recommendations (no way limited to just recent purchases) based on 1. Purchases 2. Searches 3. Browsing history (via trackers, ads, affiliate links) 4. Activities (on their digital devices, tagging things on their websites in wishlist, adding preferences in your account etc) 5. Global and Local trends (people in your area/country buy..., people with similar buying pattern buy..., It's Eid and you're Muslim, so you buy...) ...And probably many other signals I might be missing. They must have got pretty good people working with this and enough data to get their models right. Also, Amazon makes decisions on new retail businesses to start depending on those signals. techcrunch.com/2016/11/03/amazons-priva…... That, and considering the fact that Amazon has an unshakeable culture of making data-driven decisions for everything it does... I guess what I'm trying to say is, Amazon and its subsidiaries may not be as dumb at AI/ML as it might seem to be by gauging against one datapoint. Also see: cnbc.com/2014/04/09/big-data-knows-your…...