Machine Learning with Swift

Feedback loops

At a conference, a speaker talked about a new product that his company was developing. Airline sites, explained the speaker, change their ticket prices in a hardly predictable way depending on various indicators and using models known only to them. So the speaker and his colleagues collected the data on price trends from some airline sites and built a regression model. This would predict changes in ticket prices and provide users with advice on whether to buy a ticket for a flight at that time or wait to save money. One of the listeners (it wasn't me) raised a hand and asked: "What will happen when the airlines learn about your site and update their models to take into account your forecast?" The question took the speaker by ...