A locally-built, LLM-digested index of recent arXiv papers in quant finance, geometry/topology, and statistical ML — keyword search served straight from SQLite on this machine.
We study the problem of dynamic assortment personalization with large, heterogeneous populations and wide arrays of products, and demonstrate the importance of structural priors for effective, efficient large-scale personalization. Assortment personalization is the problem of choosing, for each individual (type), a bes…
We study the dynamic assortment planning problem, where for each arriving customer, the seller offers an assortment of substitutable products and customer makes the purchase among offered products according to an uncapacitated multinomial logit (MNL) model. Since all the utility parameters of MNL are unknown, the selle…
In this paper, we study the dynamic assortment optimization problem under a finite selling season of length T. At each time period, the seller offers an arriving customer an assortment of substitutable products under a cardinality constraint, and the customer makes the purchase among offered products according to a d…
We study a stylized dynamic assortment planning problem during a selling season of finite length T. At each time period, the seller offers an arriving customer an assortment of substitutable products and the customer makes the purchase among offered products according to a discrete choice model. The goal of the selle…
Study dynamic assortment and positioning of products with varying display effects.
problem Dynamic assortment and positioning of products with varying display effects.
method Design round-based learning algorithms for both multiplicative and general position effects models, and develop efficient subroutines for optimization.
result First regret-optimal characterization for both models, with matching upper and lower bounds.
In this short note we consider a dynamic assortment planning problem under the capacitated multinomial logit (MNL) bandit model. We prove a tight lower bound on the accumulated regret that matches existing regret upper bounds for all parameters (time horizon T, number of items N and maximum assortment capacity K)…
The paper proposes a method to test properties of the optimal assortment in multinomial logit models.
problem Uncertainty quantification for the optimal assortment in multinomial logit models.
method The paper proposes a novel inferential framework to test properties of the optimal assortment in multinomial logit models, reducing the problem to detecting the sign change point of marginal revenue gaps.
result The asymptotic normality of the marginal revenue gap estimator and the construction of a maximum statistic to detect the sign change point.
Study non-linear combinatorial bandits with polynomial rewards, finding significant differences from linear cases.
problem Adversarial combinatorial bandits with general non-linear reward functions.
method Extending existing work on adversarial linear combinatorial bandits, analyzing minimax optimal regret for polynomial and non-polynomial reward functions.
result Minimax optimal regret bounds for adversarial combinatorial bandits with general non-linear reward functions.
This work studies the parameter identification problem for the Markov chain choice model of Blanchet, Gallego, and Goyal used in assortment planning. In this model, the product selected by a customer is determined by a Markov chain over the products, where the products in the offered assortment are absorbing states. Th…
VASE uses Bayesian neural networks to improve exploration in sparse reward environments.
problem Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards.
method VASE uses a Bayesian neural network model of the environment dynamics and variational inference to alternately update the model's accuracy and policy.
result VASE outperforms other surprise-based exploration techniques in continuous control sparse reward environments.
We consider assortment optimization over a continuous spectrum of products represented by the unit interval, where the seller's problem consists of determining the optimal subset of products to offer to potential customers. To describe the relation between assortment and customer choice, we propose a probabilistic choi…
We consider the problem of learning the preferences of a heterogeneous population by observing choices from an assortment of products, ads, or other offerings. Our observation model takes a form common in assortment planning applications: each arriving customer is offered an assortment consisting of a subset of all pos…
Several social, medical, engineering and biological challenges rely on discovering the functionality of networks from their structure and node metadata, when it is available. For example, in chemoinformatics one might want to detect whether a molecule is toxic based on structure and atomic types, or discover the resear…
Customer behavior is often assumed to follow weak rationality, which implies that adding a product to an assortment will not increase the choice probability of another product in that assortment. However, an increasing amount of research has revealed that customers are not necessarily rational when making decisions. In…
We introduce a probabilistic framework that represents stylized banking networks with the aim of predicting the size of contagion events. Most previous work on random financial networks assumes independent connections between banks, whereas our framework explicitly allows for (dis)assortative edge probabilities (e.g., …
The stochastic block model (SBM) is a popular tool for community detection in networks, but fitting it by maximum likelihood (MLE) involves a computationally infeasible optimization problem. We propose a new semidefinite programming (SDP) solution to the problem of fitting the SBM, derived as a relaxation of the MLE. W…
Numerous social, medical, engineering and biological challenges can be framed as graph-based learning tasks. Here, we propose a new feature based approach to network classification. We show how dynamics on a network can be useful to reveal patterns about the organization of the components of the underlying graph where …