Online Personalized Assortment Optimization with High-Dimensional Customer Contextual Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Problem definition: Consider an online personalized assortment optimization problem in which customers arrive sequentially and make their decisions (e.g., click an ad, purchase a product) following the multinomial logit choice model with unknown parameters. Utilizing a customer’s personal information that is high-dimensional, the firm selects an assortment tailored for each individual customer’s preference. Academic/practical relevance: High dimensionality of a customer’s contextual information is prevalent in real applications, and it creates tremendous computational challenge in online personalized optimization. Methodology: In this paper, an efficient learning algorithm is developed to tackle the computational complexity issue while maintaining satisfactory performance. The algorithm first applies a random projection for dimension reduction and incorporates an online convex optimization procedure for parameter estimation, thus overcoming the issue of linearly increasing computational requirement as data accumulates. Then, it integrates the upper confidence bound method to balance the exploration and revenue exploitation. Results: The theoretical performance of the algorithm in terms of regret is derived under some plausible sparsity assumption on personal information that is observed in real data, and numerical experiments using both synthetic data and a real data set from Yahoo! show that the algorithm performs very well, having scalability and significant advantage in computational time compared with benchmark methods. Managerial implications: Our findings suggest that practitioners should process high-dimensional sparse customer data with an appropriate feature engineering technique, such as random projection (instead of abandoning the sparse portion) to maximize the effectiveness of online optimization algorithms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".