ORIGINAL COMPANY-CONTEXT PRACTICE
Measure synthetic on-shelf availability without visit bias
Original practice scenario: A retail simulator records shelf audits at irregular times and extra visits to troubled stores. How would you summarize availability?
Written for independent practice using company context; this is not a verified question from a company interview.
A REASONED APPROACH
Model answer.
An audit-row average measures observations, not automatically store-time availability. Extra visits to problematic stores change the sample, so the denominator must match the intended reporting question.
Work through it
- Define the target as sampled-visit availability or estimated store-time exposure, retaining visit reason, timestamp, product and store identifiers.
- Deduplicate repeated audits within the chosen observation unit and use an explicit weighting or sampling design if estimating a broader population.
- Report coverage and missingness by store and period, compare routine and exception visits, and test products absent from an audit separately from recorded stockouts.
Tradeoffs to discuss
- Routine-only samples improve comparability but omit useful exception information; combining both requires transparent assumptions.
Common pitfalls
- Do not interpret an unrecorded product as available or unavailable by default.
- A SQL calculation cannot remove selection bias that the data collection design does not identify.