论文标题

LBCF:大规模预算约束的因果林算法

LBCF: A Large-Scale Budget-Constrained Causal Forest Algorithm

论文作者

Ai, Meng, Li, Biao, Gong, Heyang, Yu, Qingwei, Xue, Shengjie, Zhang, Yuan, Zhang, Yunzhou, Jiang, Peng

论文摘要

向用户提供激励措施(例如,在亚马逊的优惠券,Uber的折扣和Tiktok的视频奖金)是在线平台使用的一种常见策略,以增加用户参与度和平台收入。尽管具有公认的有效性,但这些营销激励措施仍会不可避免的成本,如果不正确使用的话,可能会导致ROI(投资回报率)较低。另一方面,不同的用户对这些激励措施的反应不同,例如,有些用户从不购买某些没有优惠券的产品,而另一些用户无论如何都可以。因此,如何在预算限制下为每个用户选择适量的激励措施(即治疗)是一个重要的研究问题,具有很大的实际含义。在本文中,我们将这种问题称为预算受限的治疗选择(BTS)问题。 面临的挑战是如何在大规模数据集上有效解决BTS问题,并在现有技术上取得改进的结果。我们在预算限制下提出了一种新型的基于树木的治疗选择技术,称为大规模预算约束的因果林(LBCF)算法,该算法也是一种有效的治疗选择算法,适用于现代分布式计算系统。还提出了一种新型的离线评估方法来克服在随机对照试验(RCT)数据中评估解决方案问题的内在挑战。我们在大型视频平台上的现实情况下部署方法,该平台会提供奖金,以增加用户的广告系列参与时间。仿真分析,离线和在线实验都表明,我们的方法的表现优于各种基于树的最先进的基线。拟议的方法目前正在平台上为数亿用户提供服务,并在这些月中取得了最大的改进之一。

Offering incentives (e.g., coupons at Amazon, discounts at Uber and video bonuses at Tiktok) to user is a common strategy used by online platforms to increase user engagement and platform revenue. Despite its proven effectiveness, these marketing incentives incur an inevitable cost and might result in a low ROI (Return on Investment) if not used properly. On the other hand, different users respond differently to these incentives, for instance, some users never buy certain products without coupons, while others do anyway. Thus, how to select the right amount of incentives (i.e. treatment) to each user under budget constraints is an important research problem with great practical implications. In this paper, we call such problem as a budget-constrained treatment selection (BTS) problem. The challenge is how to efficiently solve BTS problem on a Large-Scale dataset and achieve improved results over the existing techniques. We propose a novel tree-based treatment selection technique under budget constraints, called Large-Scale Budget-Constrained Causal Forest (LBCF) algorithm, which is also an efficient treatment selection algorithm suitable for modern distributed computing systems. A novel offline evaluation method is also proposed to overcome an intrinsic challenge in assessing solutions' performance for BTS problem in randomized control trials (RCT) data. We deploy our approach in a real-world scenario on a large-scale video platform, where the platform gives away bonuses in order to increase users' campaign engagement duration. The simulation analysis, offline and online experiments all show that our method outperforms various tree-based state-of-the-art baselines. The proposed approach is currently serving over hundreds of millions of users on the platform and achieves one of the most tremendous improvements over these months.

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