English

Distribution Shift in Airline Customer Behavior during COVID-19

Machine Learning 2021-12-24 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science Econometrics

Abstract

Traditional AI approaches in customized (personalized) contextual pricing applications assume that the data distribution at the time of online pricing is similar to that observed during training. However, this assumption may be violated in practice because of the dynamic nature of customer buying patterns, particularly due to unanticipated system shocks such as COVID-19. We study the changes in customer behavior for a major airline during the COVID-19 pandemic by framing it as a covariate shift and concept drift detection problem. We identify which customers changed their travel and purchase behavior and the attributes affecting that change using (i) Fast Generalized Subset Scanning and (ii) Causal Forests. In our experiments with simulated and real-world data, we present how these two techniques can be used through qualitative analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.14938,
  title  = {Distribution Shift in Airline Customer Behavior during COVID-19},
  author = {Abhinav Garg and Naman Shukla and Lavanya Marla and Sriram Somanchi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.14938},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

6 pages, 5 figures, NeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Distribution Shifts: connecting methods and applications (DistShift)

R2 v1 2026-06-24T07:56:39.875Z