Targeted Advertising on Social Networks Using Online Variational Tensor Regression

This paper is concerned with online targeted advertising on social networks. The main technical task we address is to estimate the activation probability for user pairs, which quantifies the influence one user may have on another towards purchasing decisions. This is a challenging task because one marketing episode typically involves a multitude of marketing campaigns/strategies of different products for highly diverse customers. In this paper, we propose what we believe is the first tensor-based contextual bandit framework for online targeted advertising. The proposed framework is designed to accommodate any number of feature vectors in the form of multi-mode tensor, thereby enabling to capture the heterogeneity that may exist over user preferences, products, and campaign strategies in a unified manner. To handle inter-dependency of tensor modes, we introduce an online variational algorithm with a mean-field approximation. We empirically confirm that the proposed TensorUCB algorithm achieves a significant improvement in influence maximization tasks over the benchmarks, which is attributable to its capability of capturing the user-product heterogeneity.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure

Tensorial Change Analysis Using Probabilistic Tensor Regression

This paper proposes a new method for change detection and analysis using tensor regression. Change detection in our setting is to detect changes in the relationship between the input tensor and the output scalar while change analysis is to compute the responsibility score of individual tensor modes and dimensions for the change detected. We develop a new probabilistic tensor regression method, which can be viewed as a probabilistic generalization of the alternating least squares algorithm. Thanks to the probabilistic formulation, the derived change scores have a clear information-theoretic interpretation. We apply our method to semiconductor manufacturing to demonstrate the utility. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work of change analysis based on probabilistic tensor regression