Related papers: Decision Forest: A Nonparametric Approach to Model…
The decision tree is one of the most popular and classical machine learning models from the 1980s. However, in many practical applications, decision trees tend to generate decision paths with excessive depth. Long decision paths often cause…
Decision forests are widely used for classification and regression tasks. A lesser known property of tree-based methods is that one can construct a proximity matrix from the tree(s), and these proximity matrices are induced kernels. While…
This paper presents the Sequential Rationality Hypothesis, which argues that consumers are better able to make utility-maximizing decisions when products appear in sequential pairwise comparisons rather than in simultaneous multi-option…
We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…
Pricing decisions of companies require an understanding of the causal effect of a price change on the demand. When real-life pricing experiments are infeasible, data-driven decision-making must be based on alternative data sources such as…
When building recommendation systems, we seek to output a helpful set of items to the user. Under the hood, a ranking model predicts which of two candidate items is better, and we must distill these pairwise comparisons into the user-facing…
This paper investigates a multi-product stochastic inventory problem in which a cash-constrained online retailer can adopt order-based loan provided by some Chinese e-commerce platforms to speed up its cash recovery for deferred revenue. We…
This thesis contributes a structured inquiry into the open actuarial mathematics problem of modelling user behaviour using machine learning methods, in order to predict purchase intent of non-life insurance products. It is valuable for a…
Fitting models to data is an important part of the practice of science. Advances in machine learning have made it possible to fit more -- and more complex -- models, but have also exacerbated a problem: when multiple models fit the data…
A random forest prediction can be computed by the scalar product of the labels of the training examples and a set of weights that are determined by the leafs of the forest into which the test object falls; each prediction can hence be…
Integrated interpretability without sacrificing the prediction accuracy of decision making algorithms has the potential of greatly improving their value to the user. Instead of assigning a label to an image directly, we propose to learn…
Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…
Although behavioral economics has demonstrated that there are many situations where rational choice is a poor empirical model, it has so far failed to provide quantitative models of economic problems such as price formation. We make a step…
Decision trees, owing to their interpretability, are attractive as control policies for (dynamical) systems. Unfortunately, constructing, or synthesising, such policies is a challenging task. Previous approaches do so by imitating a…
Inferring a decision tree from a given dataset is one of the classic problems in machine learning. This problem consists of buildings, from a labelled dataset, a tree such that each node corresponds to a class and a path between the tree…
Increasing users' positive interactions, such as purchases or clicks, is an important objective of recommender systems. Recommenders typically aim to select items that users will interact with. If the recommended items are purchased, an…
Motivated by online settings where users can provide explicit feedback about the relevance of products that are sequentially presented to them, we look at the recommendation process as a problem of dynamically optimizing this relevance…
Implicit feedback is the simplest form of user feedback that can be used for item recommendation. It is easy to collect and is domain independent. However, there is a lack of negative examples. Previous work tackles this problem by assuming…
In this paper, we introduce a model that adds a non-linearity to discounting: the discounting factor may depend on the notional (i.e., discounted values are no longer linear in the notional). In the first part of the paper, we provide a…
It is of high interest for a company to identify customers expected to bring the largest profit in the upcoming period. Knowing as much as possible about each customer is crucial for such predictions. However, their demographic data,…