Improved statistics

Why is this important for you?

Yes, this topic sounds boring.
However statistics are the difference between a toy being out of stock or in your hands and between stocking too many of one toy or having the funds to add an additional model to our inventory.
We are a very small company and have limited money to work with.

Last year

Last year in February we made a huge leap by going from educated guesses and estimations to actual statistics for predicting how many toys to restock.
This has made visible a large number of overestimations, wrong impressions and wishful thinking.

It worked much better then human intuition but we did notice a few oddities here and there. Especially around the Christmas holidays, around the sales during Eurofurence or when we where away for MMC or H-Con.

This year

This year we went even further.
Since YiffyToys exists long enough to go back many, many years and we have all the additional values collected since last year, we can now scientifically evaluate how well our predictions match reality.

First, we defined a huge collection of test cases.
Then we very carefully defined the actual metric to optimise for.
And finally we went to compare different ways to do predictions.
Again the results where very surprising and sometimes counter intuitive.
However we know for a fact that our new statistics produce results that are easily 3 times more accurate then before.