132 research outputs found
An Efficient Bandit Algorithm for Realtime Multivariate Optimization
Optimization is commonly employed to determine the content of web pages, such
as to maximize conversions on landing pages or click-through rates on search
engine result pages. Often the layout of these pages can be decoupled into
several separate decisions. For example, the composition of a landing page may
involve deciding which image to show, which wording to use, what color
background to display, etc. Such optimization is a combinatorial problem over
an exponentially large decision space. Randomized experiments do not scale well
to this setting, and therefore, in practice, one is typically limited to
optimizing a single aspect of a web page at a time. This represents a missed
opportunity in both the speed of experimentation and the exploitation of
possible interactions between layout decisions.
Here we focus on multivariate optimization of interactive web pages. We
formulate an approach where the possible interactions between different
components of the page are modeled explicitly. We apply bandit methodology to
explore the layout space efficiently and use hill-climbing to select optimal
content in realtime. Our algorithm also extends to contextualization and
personalization of layout selection. Simulation results show the suitability of
our approach to large decision spaces with strong interactions between content.
We further apply our algorithm to optimize a message that promotes adoption of
an Amazon service. After only a single week of online optimization, we saw a
21% conversion increase compared to the median layout. Our technique is
currently being deployed to optimize content across several locations at
Amazon.com.Comment: KDD'17 Audience Appreciation Awar
Efficient Optimal Selection for Composited Advertising Creatives with Tree Structure
Ad creatives are one of the prominent mediums for online e-commerce
advertisements. Ad creatives with enjoyable visual appearance may increase the
click-through rate (CTR) of products. Ad creatives are typically handcrafted by
advertisers and then delivered to the advertising platforms for advertisement.
In recent years, advertising platforms are capable of instantly compositing ad
creatives with arbitrarily designated elements of each ingredient, so
advertisers are only required to provide basic materials. While facilitating
the advertisers, a great number of potential ad creatives can be composited,
making it difficult to accurately estimate CTR for them given limited real-time
feedback. To this end, we propose an Adaptive and Efficient ad creative
Selection (AES) framework based on a tree structure. The tree structure on
compositing ingredients enables dynamic programming for efficient ad creative
selection on the basis of CTR. Due to limited feedback, the CTR estimator is
usually of high variance. Exploration techniques based on Thompson sampling are
widely used for reducing variances of the CTR estimator, alleviating feedback
sparsity. Based on the tree structure, Thompson sampling is adapted with
dynamic programming, leading to efficient exploration for potential ad
creatives with the largest CTR. We finally evaluate the proposed algorithm on
the synthetic dataset and the real-world dataset. The results show that our
approach can outperform competing baselines in terms of convergence rate and
overall CTR
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