DACRI: Decision-Aware Causal Intervention Ranking for Critical Supply Chains

Detecting or attributing a supply-chain disruption is not the same as selecting the intervention that maximizes recoverable net value. We present CriticalSCM-Bench v1, a controlled synthetic benchmark with causal ground truth, paired factual/counterfactual rollouts, and an explicit net-value objective. Relative to a full-information train-selected static benchmark, LambdaMART improves median normalized net value by 5.7--16.2\%, with paired statistical support on the semiconductor and critical-material archetypes but not on digital infrastructure. On digital infrastructure, a domain-informed constant-buffer policy remains stronger, showing that greater model complexity is not uniformly justified. Across partial and delayed settings, LambdaMART retains 33--75\% of full-clamp value. Stress tests further show that intervention fidelity, timing, cost, and held-out disruptions can alter policy ordering. Critical materials show the weakest out-of-distribution retention. Separately, a guarded explanation study over 540 generations preserves every fixed intervention decision after deterministic validation and template fallback, although exact wording remains unstable. Within this controlled setting, the results identify regimes in which adaptive ranking adds value and those in which simpler structural policies remain preferable.

When Does Machine Learning Beat Value Sorting? A Three-Dataset Diagnostic of Exposure-Weighted Shipment Prioritization

Delay-risk models are usually judged by predictive accuracy. What matters in practice is narrower: with capacity to review only a few shipments, which ones should a manager check first? We evaluate whether machine learning clears a demanding no-model baseline: inspect the highest-value shipments first. Across three real supply-chain contexts: SCMS procurement, DataCo logistics, and Olist e-commerce, we use leakage-controlled rolling-origin evaluation and 1000-sample paired bootstrap confidence intervals. Ranking by predicted delay severity times known value (M1) beats severity-only ranking in all three datasets, yet it does not generally beat value sorting. At a 10% review budget, M1 minus VALUE_ONLY is -5.5 percentage points (pp) for SCMS, +10.1 pp for DataCo, and -4.9 pp for Olist. The divide is consistent with severity learnability: DataCo has R^2 = 0.27 and calibration bias of +0.01 days, whereas SCMS and Olist have R^2 of approximately -0.02 and negative calibration bias. Nested-CV cost-sensitive retraining does not deliver a stable improvement over M1. Rather than proposing a new learning algorithm, this paper presents a deployment diagnostic and evaluation protocol. Value sorting should remain a permanent benchmark, and ML should be deployed only after severity learnability and calibration have been audited and the model clears that gate under leakage-controlled rolling-origin evaluation.

Accuracy-Preserving Stability Regularization for Large-Scale Retail Demand Forecasting

Retail demand forecasts are reused across replenishment, capacity, labor, and transportation planning cycles. Point-error objectives do not constrain abrupt movement between adjacent forecasts, while post-hoc smoothing acts only after model fitting. We ask whether a training-time penalty on consecutive within-series movement can improve horizontal forecast-path stability without materially changing point accuracy. The penalty is evaluated in a temporal-structured pipeline combining recent-demand embeddings with calendar, price, hierarchy, item, and store features. On selected M5 demand series at 1000, 3000, and 4000-series scales, the stability-aware hybrid model improves Forecast Stability Score over XGBoost by 6.91%, 6.66%, and 7.68%, respectively, while RMSE changes remain within 0.72% across three random seeds. Post-hoc exponential smoothing attains lower raw movement but incurs a larger RMSE cost; training-time regularization preserves more point accuracy and performs favorably under normalized stability. These findings extend forecast evaluation from point-error minimization toward an accuracy-stability trade-off perspective for operational retail forecasting.