Show Me the Money: Dynamic Recommendations for Revenue Maximization

Recommender Systems (RS) play a vital role in applications such as e-commerce and on-demand content streaming. Research on RS has mainly focused on the customer perspective, i.e., accurate prediction of user preferences and maximization of user utilities. As a result, most existing techniques are not explicitly built for revenue maximization, the primary business goal of enterprises. In this work, we explore and exploit a novel connection between RS and the profitability of a business. As recommendations can be seen as an information channel between a business and its customers, it is interesting and important to investigate how to make strategic dynamic recommendations leading to maximum possible revenue. To this end, we propose a novel \model that takes into account a variety of factors including prices, valuations, saturation effects, and competition amongst products. Under this model, we study the problem of finding revenue-maximizing recommendation strategies over a finite time horizon. We show that this problem is NP-hard, but approximation guarantees can be obtained for a slightly relaxed version, by establishing an elegant connection to matroid theory. Given the prohibitively high complexity of the approximation algorithm, we also design intelligent heuristics for the original problem. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two real and synthetic datasets and demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness our algorithms, and that they significantly outperform several intuitive baselines.Comment: Conference version published in PVLDB 7(14). To be presented in the VLDB Conference 2015, in Hawaii. This version gives a detailed submodularity proo

A Framework for Medical Images Classification Using Soft Set

AbstractMedical images classification is a significant research area that receives growing attention from both the research community and medicine industry. It addresses the problem of diagnosis, analysis and teaching purposes in medicine. For these several medical imaging modalities and applications based on data mining techniques have been proposed and developed. Thus, the primary objective of medical images classification is not only to achieve good accuracy but to understand which parts of anatomy are affected by the disease to help clinicians in early diagnosis of the pathology and in learning the progression of a disease. This furnishes motivation from the advancement in data mining techniques and particularly in soft set, to propose a classification algorithm based on the notions of soft set theory. As a result, a new framework for medical imaging classification consisting of six phases namely: data acquisition, data pre-processing, data partition, soft set classifier, data analysis and performance evolution is presented. It is expected that soft set classifier will provide better results in terms of sensitivity, specificity, running time and overall classifier accuracy

Learning a Language: the Gateway to Cosmopolitanism

This thesis explores the relationship between language acquisition and ethnocentrism. Specifically, does learning additional languages reduce ethnocentrism in an individual? After reviewing the literature on social groups, ethnocentrism, and language acquisition, a quantitative test was carried out. This consisted of a survey design implemented in Morocco using Moroccan subjects. Although learning additional languages was correlated with less ethnocentrism, the results did not meet the threshold for statistical significance. The variables that did have a statistically significant impact on ethnocentrism and prejudice were contact and age