APL

In December 2022 SAP held a machine learning competition called “I quit!” attended by 50 participants to showcase the machine learning capabilities of SAP HANA Cloud. The idea is to predict from a database of employees who is the most probable to be leaving his or her job in the short term, based on historical information of employees which have quit recently.

This is part 2 in a two-part series of blogs on large-scale and explainable forecasting using APL. In part 1 I have outlined a way to utilize the APL library for in-database training of a regression model in HANA in order to be used together with an external Node.

Background Last year I became involved in a project for a retailer based in The Netherlands who had finished construction of a new distribution center. This new innovative DC is fully mechanized and is operated with a minimal amount of personnel, which is different from conventional distribution centers where sudden large order spikes are fulfilled by having more staff pick these orders in parallel.