Influence based cost optimization on user preference

Abstract

The popularity of e-business and preference learning techniques have contributed a huge amount of product and user preference data. Analyzing the influence of an existing or new product among the users is critical to unlock the great scientific and social-economic value of these data. In this paper, we advocate the problem of influence-based cost optimization for the user preference and product data, which is fundamental in many real applications such as marketing and advertising. Generally, we aim to find a cost optimal position for a new product such that it can attract at least k or a particular percentage of users for the given user preference functions and competitors' products. Although we show the solution space of our problem can be reduced to a finite number of possible positions (points) by utilizing the classical k-level computation techniques, the computation cost is still very expensive due to the nature of the high combinatorial complexity of the k-level problem. To alleviate this issue, we develop efficient pruning and query processing techniques to significantly improve the performance. In particular, our traverse-based 2-dimensional algorithm is very efficient with time complexity O(n) where n is the number of user preference functions. For general multi-dimensional spaces, we develop space partition based algorithm to significantly improve the performance by utilizing cost-based, influence-based and local dominance based pruning techniques. Then, we show that the performance of the partition based algorithm can be further enhanced by utilizing sampling approach, where the problem can be reduced to the classical half-space intersection problem. We demonstrate the efficiency of our techniques with extensive experiments over real and synthetic datasets.Suppose a company wants to design a new type of laptop (i.e., a point in the 2-dimensional space) to attract at least 4 out of the 5 users; that is, occupying at least 80% of the market share in this example. Following the convention [6], we use a preference line H i to represent a user linear preference 978-1-5090-2020-1/16/$31.00

Towards Revenue Maximization with Popular and Profitable Products

“…Geng and Hamilton [12] reviewed some measures that are intended for selecting and ranking patterns according to the potential interest to the user. The consumer behavior analytics is crucially important for decision-maker, which can be used to support the global market and has attracted many considerable attentions [34,38,44,45]. Recently, some researchers studied the profit of web mining such as profit-oriented pattern mining [2,38], association [46], market share [35], and decision making to maximize the revenue from products [1,12,37].…”

“…Economic-wise, a common goal for companies conducting marketing is to maximize the return profit by utilizing various effective marketing strategies. Consumer behavior plays a very important role in economy and targeted marketing [34,44,45,50]. A successful business influences the behavior of consumers to encourage them buying its products.…”

Towards Revenue Maximization with Popular and Profitable Products

“…Geng and Hamilton [12] reviewed some measures that are intended for selecting and ranking patterns according to the potential interest to the user. The consumer behavior analytics is crucially important for decision-maker, which can be used to support the global market and has attracted many considerable attentions [34,38,44,45]. Recently, some researchers studied the proit of web mining such as proit-oriented pattern mining [2,38], association [46], market share [35], and decision making to maximize the revenue from products [1,12,37].…”

“…Economic-wise, a common goal for companies conducting marketing is to maximize the return proit by utilizing various efective marketing strategies. Consumer behavior plays a very important role in economy and targeted marketing [34,44,45,50]. A successful business inluences the behavior of consumers to encourage them buying its products.…”

“…The consumer behavior analytics is crucially important for decision maker, which can be used to support the global market and has attracted many considerable attentions [2,34,38,44,45]. In economics, utility [32] is a measure of a consumer's preferences over alternative sets of goods or services.…”