Cost-effective incentive allocation via structured counterfactual inference

Mar 1, 2020·
Romain Lopez
,
Chenchen Li
,
Xiang Yan
,
Junwu Xiong
,
Michael I. Jordan
,
Yuan Qi
,
Le Song
· 0 min read
Abstract
We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern industry, in which a mediator tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives for customers in a marketing campaign and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to traditional policy optimization frameworks, we rely on a specific assumption for the reward structure and we incorporate budget constraints. We develop a new two-step method for solving this constrained counterfactual policy optimization problem. First, we cast the reward estimation problem as a domain adaptation problem with supplementary structure. Subsequently, the estimators are used for optimizing the policy with constraints. We establish theoretical error bounds for our estimation procedure and we empirically show that the approach leads to significant improvement on both synthetic and real datasets.
Type
Publication
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence