Hello Nupic,
I have some questions about feeding in known events and also, how I should handle multiple 'locations' that have similar properties but that may not be directly related in reality. Please let me know if I'm asking in the wrong mail list. I'm also providing a brief description and example of the project. Outline of Problem Restaurants that offer food delivery are forced to hire drivers, pay for insurance, pay for wages + predict how many drivers are needed in advance and schedule their hours. I propose to abstract this as a service where restaurants can simply use an app to request a driver and let this service-business worry about drivers, insurance, wages, roster scheduling etc. To achieve this, the central ‘delivery system’ needs to predict how many jobs are going to come from each area within a city to allow scheduling of drivers days/weeks in advance. I believe NuPIC is ideal to solve this problem, but I have a few questions that I hope the mailing list can help with. *Assuming for this example:* - That a city is divided into 15 geographical areas. - That I have 3 months of known data with the amount of total deliveries that came from each area per hour. - That I need to predict the number_of_deliveries per hour (days/week in advance, not too concerned with how far in advance yet.) Example Data *Example of 3hrs of data for one of those 15 areas:* *dttm* *number_of_deliveries* *datetime* *int* *T* 2015/08/01 00:00:00.0 178 2015/08/01 01:00:00.0 96 2015/08/01 02:00:00.0 52 Questions 1. 1. If I want to incorporate event data for known upcoming events such as a national holiday/football game/TV series finale airing; how should this hourly event data be arranged? a. Matthew Taylor suggested <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYOwBlVuJDw> to use a count down until the hours of the event i. How would this work if I wanted to weight certain events differently? (e.g. A national bank holiday would be weighted higher than a television series episode airing) ii. While the event is occurring, how should the countdown be represented? Should it be ..,5,4,3,2,1,1,1,1,1,…,1,20,19,.. *(Red being the event currently on for that hour(s) or some cases the whole day(s))* 2. 2. I need to do this for multiple locations, would a field to specify each location be correct (Meaning there would be x15 {Saturday @ 12:00}, *one for each of the 15 locations*) or should they be totally separated? a. If I separate locations completely, would you expect I lose value in anyway? b. If I keep them together, could locations contaminate/effect each other that may not happen in reality? *c. **Apologies for this broad question, if anyone could even point me to suggested reading, I would appreciate it.* Thank you for reading! *Best regards, Alan Haverty**[email protected] <[email protected]>*
