Thursday, March 28

AWS Launches a Machine Learning Tool Amazon Forecast

Amazon’s cloud computing services known as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched a new pre-built machine learning tool that will make it easier for developers to generate predictions based on time-series data. The new service will be called Amazon Forecast.

Amazon has built a number of models to handle its own data in its retail business and this one is essentially the same technology that Amazon uses to forecast demand on its retail site.

Under this, the users provide the company with all of their supply chain data and then give the service the variables that could have impact on the forecast.

“With just three clicks, you can give us the information and get a forecast,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said. “It’s super simple and when we benchmarked with customers in the private beta and ourselves, it’s providing up to 50 percent more accurate forecasts than what people were doing on their own before at one-tenth of the cost of traditional supply chain software.”

Behind the scenes, AWS looks at the data and the signal and then chooses from eight different pre-built algorithms, trains the model, tweaks it and provides the forecast.

The company is also making it easy to integrate this service with SAP’s and Oracle’s supply chain tools, as well as Amazon’s new Timestream database service.

The new service isn’t necessarily cheap, but it will surely save developers a lot of time.