Author(s): Kamrun Nahar
Originally published on Towards AI.
SARIMAX, Prophet, XGBoost, LSTM, and N-BEATS broken down without any pretentious math. Pick the right model in under five minutes today.
The 9 billion dollar lesson.
In November 2021, Zillow walked into a conference room and admitted that their AI had set 7,000 houses on fire. Not literally. Financially. They’d built an algorithm to buy and flip homes, and the algorithm spent two years quietly overpaying for everything in Phoenix, Atlanta, and a dozen other markets. By the time they noticed, the company had to take a 304 million dollar write-down, lay off a quarter of the entire staff, and shut down the iBuying business completely. The market cap dropped about 7.8 billion dollars in days.
