Related papers: Loss Functions for Discrete Contextual Pricing wit…
We study an off-policy contextual pricing problem where the seller has access to samples of prices that customers were previously offered, whether they purchased at that price, and auxiliary features describing the customer and/or item…
We study loss functions that measure the accuracy of a prediction based on multiple data points simultaneously. To our knowledge, such loss functions have not been studied before in the area of property elicitation or in machine learning…
A choice of optimization objective is immensely pivotal in the design of a recommender system as it affects the general modeling process of a user's intent from previous interactions. Existing approaches mainly adhere to three categories of…
Contextual dynamic pricing aims to set personalized prices based on sequential interactions with customers. At each time period, a customer who is interested in purchasing a product comes to the platform. The customer's valuation for the…
We consider off-policy evaluation and optimization with continuous action spaces. We focus on observational data where the data collection policy is unknown and needs to be estimated. We take a semi-parametric approach where the value…
This paper studies the evaluation of policies that recommend an ordered set of items (e.g., a ranking) based on some context---a common scenario in web search, ads, and recommendation. We build on techniques from combinatorial bandits to…
With the rise of the digital economy and an explosion of available information about consumers, effective personalization of goods and services has become a core business focus for companies to improve revenues and maintain a competitive…
We propose a method for building an interpretable recommender system for personalizing online content and promotions. Historical data available for the system consists of customer features, provided content (promotions), and user responses.…
We address the problem of learning a decision policy from observational data of past decisions in contexts with features and associated outcomes. The past policy maybe unknown and in safety-critical applications, such as medical decision…
Off-policy evaluation in reinforcement learning offers the chance of using observational data to improve future outcomes in domains such as healthcare and education, but safe deployment in high stakes settings requires ways of assessing its…
We develop a decision making framework to cast the problem of learning a ranking policy for search or recommendation engines in a two-sided e-commerce marketplace as an expected reward optimization problem using observational data. As a…
We consider supervised learning problems in which set predictions provide explicit uncertainty estimates. Using Choquet integrals (a.k.a. Lov{\'a}sz extensions), we propose a convex loss function for nondecreasing subset-valued functions…
New estimators for the mean and the covariance function for partially observed functional data are proposed using a detour via the fundamental theorem of calculus. The new estimators allow for a consistent estimation of the mean and…
In this paper, we provide analytic expressions for the first-order loss function, the complementary loss function and the second-order loss function for several probability distributions. These loss functions are important functions in…
Personalized pricing, which involves tailoring prices based on individual characteristics, is commonly used by firms to implement a consumer-specific pricing policy. In this process, buyers can also strategically manipulate their feature…
While data-driven decision-making is transforming modern operations, most large-scale data is of an observational nature, such as transactional records. These data pose unique challenges in a variety of operational problems posed as…
Causal effect estimation from observational data is a challenging problem, especially with high dimensional data and in the presence of unobserved variables. The available data-driven methods for tackling the problem either provide an…
Unbiased recommender learning (URL) and off-policy evaluation/learning (OPE/L) techniques are effective in addressing the data bias caused by display position and logging policies, thereby consistently improving the performance of…
This paper proposes a novel method for demand forecasting in a pricing context. Here, modeling the causal relationship between price as an input variable to demand is crucial because retailers aim to set prices in a (profit) optimal manner…
Measuring the accuracy of cross-sectional predictions is a subjective problem. Generally, this problem is avoided. In contrast, this paper confronts subjectivity up front by eliciting an impartial decision-maker's preferences. These…