Hierarchically Fusing Long and Short-Term User Interests for Click-Through Rate Prediction in Product Search

Estimating Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a vital yet challenging task in personalized product search. However, existing CTR methods still struggle in the product search settings due to the following three challenges including how to more effectively extract users' short-term interests with respect to multiple aspects, how to extract and fuse users' long-term interest with short-term interests, how to address the entangling characteristic of long and short-term interests. To resolve these challenges, in this paper, we propose a new approach named Hierarchical Interests Fusing Network (HIFN), which consists of four basic modules namely Short-term Interests Extractor (SIE), Long-term Interests Extractor (LIE), Interests Fusion Module (IFM) and Interests Disentanglement Module (IDM). Specifically, SIE is proposed to extract user's short-term interests by integrating three fundamental interests encoders within it namely query-dependent, target-dependent and causal-dependent interest encoder, respectively, followed by delivering the resultant representation to the module LIE, where it can effectively capture user long-term interests by devising an attention mechanism with respect to the short-term interests from SIE module. In IFM, the achieved long and short-term interests are further fused in an adaptive manner, followed by concatenating it with original raw context features for the final prediction result. Last but not least, considering the entangling characteristic of long and short-term interests, IDM further devises a self-supervised framework to disentangle long and short-term interests. Extensive offline and online evaluations on a real-world e-commerce platform demonstrate the superiority of HIFN over state-of-the-art methods.Comment: accpeted by CIKM'22 as a Full Pape

The Role of the Mangement Sciences in Research on Personalization

We present a review of research studies that deal with personalization. We synthesize current knowledge about these areas, and identify issues that we envision will be of interest to researchers working in the management sciences. We take an interdisciplinary approach that spans the areas of economics, marketing, information technology, and operations. We present an overarching framework for personalization that allows us to identify key players in the personalization process, as well as, the key stages of personalization. The framework enables us to examine the strategic role of personalization in the interactions between a firm and other key players in the firm's value system. We review extant literature in the strategic behavior of firms, and discuss opportunities for analytical and empirical research in this regard. Next, we examine how a firm can learn a customer's preferences, which is one of the key components of the personalization process. We use a utility-based approach to formalize such preference functions, and to understand how these preference functions could be learnt based on a customer's interactions with a firm. We identify well-established techniques in management sciences that can be gainfully employed in future research on personalization.CRM, Persoanlization, Marketing, e-commerce,

DPAN: Dynamic Preference-based and Attribute-aware Network for Relevant Recommendations

In e-commerce platforms, the relevant recommendation is a unique scenario providing related items for a trigger item that users are interested in. However, users' preferences for the similarity and diversity of recommendation results are dynamic and vary under different conditions. Moreover, individual item-level diversity is too coarse-grained since all recommended items are related to the trigger item. Thus, the two main challenges are to learn fine-grained representations of similarity and diversity and capture users' dynamic preferences for them under different conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called the Dynamic Preference-based and Attribute-aware Network (DPAN) for predicting Click-Through Rate (CTR) in relevant recommendations. Specifically, based on Attribute-aware Activation Values Generation (AAVG), Bi-dimensional Compression-based Re-expression (BCR) is designed to obtain similarity and diversity representations of user interests and item information. Then Shallow and Deep Union-based Fusion (SDUF) is proposed to capture users' dynamic preferences for the diverse degree of recommendation results according to various conditions. DPAN has demonstrated its effectiveness through extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing, resulting in a significant 7.62% improvement in CTR. Currently, DPAN has been successfully deployed on our e-commerce platform serving the primary traffic for relevant recommendations. The code of DPAN has been made publicly available

A Survey and Taxonomy of Sequential Recommender Systems for E-commerce Product Recommendation

E-commerce recommendation systems facilitate customers’ purchase decision by recommending products or services of interest (e.g., Amazon). Designing a recommender system tailored toward an individual customer’s need is crucial for retailers to increase revenue and retain customers’ loyalty. As users’ interests and preferences change with time, the time stamp of a user interaction (click, view or purchase event) is an important characteristic to learn sequential patterns from these user interactions and, hence, understand users’ long- and short-term preferences to predict the next item(s) for recommendation. This paper presents a taxonomy of sequential recommendation systems (SRecSys) with a focus on e-commerce product recommendation as an application and classifies SRecSys under three main categories as: (i) traditional approaches (sequence similarity, frequent pattern mining and sequential pattern mining), (ii) factorization and latent representation (matrix factorization and Markov models) and (iii) neural network-based approaches (deep neural networks, advanced models). This classification contributes towards enhancing the understanding of existing SRecSys in the literature with the application domain of e-commerce product recommendation and provides current status of the solutions available alongwith future research directions. Furthermore, a classification of surveyed systems according to eight important key features supported by the techniques along with their limitations is also presented. A comparative performance analysis of the presented SRecSys based on experiments performed on e-commerce data sets (Amazon and Online Retail) showed that integrating sequential purchase patterns into the recommendation process and modeling users’ sequential behavior improves the quality of recommendations

Harnessing the power of the general public for crowdsourced business intelligence: a survey

International audienceCrowdsourced business intelligence (CrowdBI), which leverages the crowdsourced user-generated data to extract useful knowledge about business and create marketing intelligence to excel in the business environment, has become a surging research topic in recent years. Compared with the traditional business intelligence that is based on the firm-owned data and survey data, CrowdBI faces numerous unique issues, such as customer behavior analysis, brand tracking, and product improvement, demand forecasting and trend analysis, competitive intelligence, business popularity analysis and site recommendation, and urban commercial analysis. This paper first characterizes the concept model and unique features and presents a generic framework for CrowdBI. It also investigates novel application areas as well as the key challenges and techniques of CrowdBI. Furthermore, we make discussions about the future research directions of CrowdBI

The Omnichannel Marketplace: A Look at Modern Consumers

Since the advent of the digital marketplace, marketing techniques to reach consumers have shifted. Traditional media and demographic analysis are no longer the only means for brands reaching consumers. Marketing has now taken an omnichannel approach. This study examined the relationship between the omnichannel consumer, the consumer benefits sought online versus in brick and mortar, and the modern marketer’s approach to omnichannel marketing. It outlines a psychographic and demographic profile of today’s omnichannel consumer, which will ultimately create a more detailed profile for businesses to market across integrated channels ultimately delivering a hybrid consumer experience (HCE). Findings in this study include cluster analyses related to consumer benefits sought and demographics as well as correlations between psychographic profiling data and demographics

Data acquisition and cost-effective predictive modeling: targeting offers for electronic commerce

Electronic commerce is revolutionizing the way we think about data modeling, by making it possible to integrate the processes of (costly) data acquisition and model induction. The opportunity for improving modeling through costly data acquisition presents itself for a diverse set of electronic commerce modeling tasks, from personalization to customer lifetime value modeling; we illustrate with the running example of choosing offers to display to web-site visitors, which captures important aspects in a familiar setting. Considering data acquisition costs explicitly can allow the building of predictive models at significantly lower costs, and a modeler may be able to improve performance via new sources of information that previously were too expensive to consider. However, existing techniques for integrating modeling and data acquisition cannot deal with the rich environment that electronic commerce presents. We discuss several possible data acquisition settings, the challenges involved in the integration with modeling, and various research areas that may supply parts of an ultimate solution. We also present and demonstrate briefly a unified framework within which one can integrate acquisitions of different types, with any cost structure and any predictive modeling objectiveNYU, Stern School of Business, IOMS Department, Center for Digital Economy Researc