7,218 research outputs found
Which Channel to Ask My Question? Personalized Customer Service Request Stream Routing using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Customer services are critical to all companies, as they may directly connect
to the brand reputation. Due to a great number of customers, e-commerce
companies often employ multiple communication channels to answer customers'
questions, for example, chatbot and hotline. On one hand, each channel has
limited capacity to respond to customers' requests, on the other hand,
customers have different preferences over these channels. The current
production systems are mainly built based on business rules, which merely
considers tradeoffs between resources and customers' satisfaction. To achieve
the optimal tradeoff between resources and customers' satisfaction, we propose
a new framework based on deep reinforcement learning, which directly takes both
resources and user model into account. In addition to the framework, we also
propose a new deep-reinforcement-learning based routing method-double dueling
deep Q-learning with prioritized experience replay (PER-DoDDQN). We evaluate
our proposed framework and method using both synthetic and a real customer
service log data from a large financial technology company. We show that our
proposed deep-reinforcement-learning based framework is superior to the
existing production system. Moreover, we also show our proposed PER-DoDDQN is
better than all other deep Q-learning variants in practice, which provides a
more optimal routing plan. These observations suggest that our proposed method
can seek the trade-off where both channel resources and customers' satisfaction
are optimal.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure
Personalization through a proactive live chat in an e-commerce: The case of Byside’s client, a multinational retail company
Retail e-commerce companies currently struggle in managing and optimizing
the performance of a proactive live chat software application. It is assumed by
companies present in the sector that providing personalized assistance to online
visitors brings positive outcomes, however, there is no scientific evidence in this
field to prove this assumption. This research aims to bring new insights into the
contribution personalization can have regarding the performance of this app.
Specifically, it investigates whether increasing personalization on the provided
assistance to the online visitor has an impact on the number and value of
influenced checkouts.
To test the hypothesis that providing more personalized assistance to the
online visitor through this application leads to increased sales, the performance
results of this app in the Croatian market of a multinational retail client were
analyzed. Two five-month periods were observed, one providing nonpersonalized
assistance and the other with personalized assistance for online
visitors, the results of both periods were analyzed using three independent
samples t-tests. The outcomes showed a statistically significant positive effect of
the personalized assistance in the application performance results.
These results suggest that online visitors who received personalized
assistance are more likely to proceed to the checkout funnel and complete the
purchase and to perform checkouts with a higher value. On this basis, personalization should be considered when managing or optimizing proactive
live chat campaigns in retail e-commerce.
The thesis is finalized by outlining its limitations and proposing new avenues
of research
A novel Big Data analytics and intelligent technique to predict driver's intent
Modern age offers a great potential for automatically predicting the driver's intent through the increasing miniaturization of computing technologies, rapid advancements in communication technologies and continuous connectivity of heterogeneous smart objects. Inside the cabin and engine of modern cars, dedicated computer systems need to possess the ability to exploit the wealth of information generated by heterogeneous data sources with different contextual and conceptual representations. Processing and utilizing this diverse and voluminous data, involves many challenges concerning the design of the computational technique used to perform this task. In this paper, we investigate the various data sources available in the car and the surrounding environment, which can be utilized as inputs in order to predict driver's intent and behavior. As part of investigating these potential data sources, we conducted experiments on e-calendars for a large number of employees, and have reviewed a number of available geo referencing systems. Through the results of a statistical analysis and by computing location recognition accuracy results, we explored in detail the potential utilization of calendar location data to detect the driver's intentions. In order to exploit the numerous diverse data inputs available in modern vehicles, we investigate the suitability of different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, and propose a novel fuzzy computational modelling methodology. Finally, we outline the impact of applying advanced CI and Big Data analytics techniques in modern vehicles on the driver and society in general, and discuss ethical and legal issues arising from the deployment of intelligent self-learning cars
Local Ranking Problem on the BrowseGraph
The "Local Ranking Problem" (LRP) is related to the computation of a
centrality-like rank on a local graph, where the scores of the nodes could
significantly differ from the ones computed on the global graph. Previous work
has studied LRP on the hyperlink graph but never on the BrowseGraph, namely a
graph where nodes are webpages and edges are browsing transitions. Recently,
this graph has received more and more attention in many different tasks such as
ranking, prediction and recommendation. However, a web-server has only the
browsing traffic performed on its pages (local BrowseGraph) and, as a
consequence, the local computation can lead to estimation errors, which hinders
the increasing number of applications in the state of the art. Also, although
the divergence between the local and global ranks has been measured, the
possibility of estimating such divergence using only local knowledge has been
mainly overlooked. These aspects are of great interest for online service
providers who want to: (i) gauge their ability to correctly assess the
importance of their resources only based on their local knowledge, and (ii)
take into account real user browsing fluxes that better capture the actual user
interest than the static hyperlink network. We study the LRP problem on a
BrowseGraph from a large news provider, considering as subgraphs the
aggregations of browsing traces of users coming from different domains. We show
that the distance between rankings can be accurately predicted based only on
structural information of the local graph, being able to achieve an average
rank correlation as high as 0.8
Distributed Online Big Data Classification Using Context Information
Distributed, online data mining systems have emerged as a result of
applications requiring analysis of large amounts of correlated and
high-dimensional data produced by multiple distributed data sources. We propose
a distributed online data classification framework where data is gathered by
distributed data sources and processed by a heterogeneous set of distributed
learners which learn online, at run-time, how to classify the different data
streams either by using their locally available classification functions or by
helping each other by classifying each other's data. Importantly, since the
data is gathered at different locations, sending the data to another learner to
process incurs additional costs such as delays, and hence this will be only
beneficial if the benefits obtained from a better classification will exceed
the costs. We model the problem of joint classification by the distributed and
heterogeneous learners from multiple data sources as a distributed contextual
bandit problem where each data is characterized by a specific context. We
develop a distributed online learning algorithm for which we can prove
sublinear regret. Compared to prior work in distributed online data mining, our
work is the first to provide analytic regret results characterizing the
performance of the proposed algorithm
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