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Managing advertising campaigns — an approximate planning approach

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Abstract

We consider the problem of displaying commercial advertisements on web pages, in the “cost per click” model. The advertisement server has to learn the appeal of each type of visitor for the different advertisements in order to maximize the profit. Advertisements have constraints such as a certain number of clicks to draw, as well as a lifetime. This problem is thus inherently dynamic, and intimately combines combinatorial and statistical issues. To set the stage, it is also noteworthy that we deal with very rare events of interest, since the base probability of one click is in the order of 10−4. Different approaches may be thought of, ranging from computationally demanding ones (use of Markov decision processes, or stochastic programming) to very fast ones.We introduce NOSEED, an adaptive policy learning algorithm based on a combination of linear programming and multi-arm bandits. We also propose a way to evaluate the extent to which we have to handle the constraints (which is directly related to the computation cost). We investigate the performance of our system through simulations on a realistic model designed with an important commercial web actor.

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Correspondence to Sertan Girgin.

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Sertan Girgin has two BSc degrees, one in Computer Engineering and the other in Mathematics He also holds a PhD in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, 2007. He was a visiting researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada, in 2006. For three years, Dr. Girgin worked as a postdoc researcher in team-project Sequel, INRIA Lille Nord Europe, France. Currently, he is with Google, Inc. His research interests include sequential learning, evolutionary computation, distributed AI and multi-agent systems.

Jérémie Mary is Assistant professor at University of Lille and member of the SequeL team at INRIA. He is also member of the european network of excellence PASCAL 2. He obtained his PhD on online machine learning, at Université Paris XI advised by Michèle Sebag and Antoine Cornuéjols. His main research interests are related to machine learning and more specifically sequential data.With Olivier Nicol (PhD student), he won the ICML’2011 challenge Exploration and Exploitation on data provided by Adobe.

Philippe Preux defended his PhD in Computer Science in 1991, at the Université de Lille, France. He is currently a professor of computer science at the Université de Lille. He is the head of the SequeL research group, affiliated to both INRIA, CNRS, and the university. Since 1991, his research has focused on adaptive systems. He has worked on genetic algorithms and metaheuristics for combinatorial optimization; he then moved to reinforcement learning. These days, his main research interests are statistical learning on sequential data, data mining and sequential decision making in face of very large amounts of data, in non stationary environments.

Olivier Nicol holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science with specialization in software engineering from the University of Lille, France. He is now studying for a PhD under Philippe Preux and Jérémie Mary in the SequeL (Sequential Learning) team at INRIA Lille. His main research interests lie in Machine learning and especially using sequential data such as web logs. For instance he is currently working on how to use data to evaluate recommendation policies (and more generally contextual bndits policies) without having to actually test them on the real world. Together with Jérémy Mary he won the ICML 2011 Exploration and Exploitation challenge which was about balancing exploration and exploitation in order to efficiently recommend items to visitors on an Adobe web site.

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Girgin, S., Mary, J., Preux, P. et al. Managing advertising campaigns — an approximate planning approach. Front. Comput. Sci. 6, 209–229 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-2873-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-012-2873-5

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