Overview
Each lane in your brokerage's historical data has a set of features, such as origin and weight. The machine learning model recognizes similarities and connections between these features, which helps it to make accurate predictions, even for new lanes. The Similar Lanes widget is a trend line in the network rate prediction graph that shows a summary of rates for lanes with features similar to those of the lane in question.
Machine learning is not usually self-referential. The model can't tell you how it predicted a rate. What we can do is show the data pool of similar lanes, so you can compare and verify the prediction. This is especially useful when you're looking at a prediction for a lane new to your brokerage.
Using The Similar Lanes Widget
Reading the Graph
The orange line on the Market Rate Prediction graph represents a summary of similar lane rates. This shows you the general trend of rates for lanes similar to the one in the prediction.
The orange field represents the overall range of aggregated data on similar lanes rates. This shows you the span of rates for similar lanes in your own historical data and throughout the Triumph network.
The number in green is the number of similar lanes with data available. You can also click this number to bring up the Similar Lanes Table
You can toggle the Similar Lanes trend line and the Market Rates trend line off and on by clicking Market or Similar below the graph.
When Similar Lanes are toggled on, you'll see numbers for similar lanes in the Details window when you hover over a point on the graph.
The Similar Lanes Table
The Similar Lanes Table gives you a closer look. To bring up the table, click the green link that shows the number of Similar Lanes.
The Similar Lanes Table shows the eight lanes closest to the prediction, along with the number of known loads that fall into each lane
The image shows Similar Lanes for a van load from Albany, NY to Chicago, IL. You can see that the lanes in the table go from New York to various markets in Illinois. These are the eight loads most similar to the Albany - Chicago van route in the prediction.
Unseen Lanes
Similar Lanes are very useful in predicting rates for lanes new to your brokerage. When there is no historical data for a lane, Rates Intelligence can still provide a reliable prediction by drawing on data from other lanes.
Criteria for Similarity
Several criteria define similarity. The main ones are:
Similar lanes come from the Triumph network.
Mileage should differ from the mileage of the target lane by no more than 20%.
Pickup and drop-off points should be close to those of the target lane. and defined by a formula. For each lane which passes the first two filters, we calculate the distance between the pickup location of the original lane and the pickup location of the tested lane, sort the results in ascending order, and select the top lanes.