Joint Optimization of Profit and Relevance for Recommendation Systems in E-commerce
In this paper, we propose a novel revenue model which jointly optimizes both for probability of purchase and profit. The model is tested on a recommendation module at Etsy.com, a two-sided marketplace for buyers and sellers. Notably, optimizing for profit, in addition to purchase probability, benefits not only the platform but also the sellers. We show that the proposed model outperforms several baselines by increasing offline metrics associated with both relevance and profit.
Understanding the Role of Style in E-commerce Shopping
n this paper, we discuss a novel process by which we leverage 43 named styles given by merchandising experts in order to bootstrap large-scale style prediction and analysis of how style impacts purchase decision. We train a supervised, style-aware deep neural network that is shown to predict item style with high accuracy, while generating style-aware embeddings that can be used in downstream recommendation tasks. We share in our analysis, based on over a year's worth of transaction data and show that these findings are crucial to understanding how to more explicitly leverage style signal in industry-scale recommender systems.
The Identification and Estimation of Direct and Indirect Effects in A/B Tests through Causal Mediation Analysis
In this paper, we introduce causal mediation analysis as a formal statistical tool to reveal the underlying causal mechanisms. Existing literature provides little guidance on cases where multiple unmeasured causally-dependent mediators exist, which are common in A/B tests. We seek a novel approach to identify in those scenarios direct and indirect effects of the treatment.