Uplift modeling is an area of machine learning which aims at predicting the causal effect of some action on a given individual. The action may be a medical procedure, marketing campaign, or any other circumstance controlled by the experimenter. Building an uplift model requires two training sets: the treatment group, where individuals have been subject to the action, and the control group, where no action has been performed. An uplift model allows then to assess the gain resulting from taking the action on a given individual, such as the increase in probability of patient recovery or of a product being purchased. This paper describes an adaptation of the well-known boosting techniques to the uplift modeling case. We formulate three desirable properties which an uplift boosting algorithm should have. Since all three properties cannot be satisfied simultaneously, we propose three uplift boosting algorithms, each satisfying two of them. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methods, which often dramatically improve performance of the base models and are thus new and powerful tools for uplift modeling.
Some variations on the uplift modeling theme have also been explored. @cite_9 proposed an approach to online advertising which combines uplift modeling with maximizing the response rate in the treatment group to increase advertiser's benefits. We do not address such problems in this paper.
@cite_9
2057521255 2011485768 2140899775 2061380513
Uplift modeling is a branch of machine learning which aims at predicting the causal effect of an action such as a marketing campaign or a medical treatment on a given individual by taking into account responses in a treatment group, containing individuals subject to the action, and a control group serving as a background. The resulting model can then be used to select individuals for whom the action will be most profitable. This paper analyzes the use of ensemble methods: bagging and random forests in uplift modeling. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation to demonstrate that the application of those methods often results in spectacular gains in model performance, turning almost useless single models into highly capable uplift ensembles. The gains are much larger than those achieved in case of standard classification. We show that those gains are a result of high ensemble diversity, which in turn is a result of the differences between class probabilities in the treatment and control groups being harder to model than the class probabilities themselves. The feature of uplift modeling which makes it difficult thus also makes it amenable to the application of ensemble methods. As a result, bagging and random forests emerge from our evaluation as key tools in the uplift modeling toolbox. Most classification approaches aim at achieving high prediction accuracy on a given dataset. However, in most practical cases, some action such as mailing an offer or treating a patient is to be taken on the classified objects, and we should model not the class probabilities themselves, but instead, the change in class probabilities caused by the action. The action should then be performed on those objects for which it will be most profitable. This problem is known as uplift modeling, differential response analysis, or true lift modeling, but has received very little attention in machine learning literature. An important modification of the problem involves several possible actions, when for each object, the model must also decide which action should be used in order to maximize profit. In this paper, we present tree-based classifiers designed for uplift modeling in both single and multiple treatment cases. To this end, we design new splitting criteria and pruning methods. The experiments confirm the usefulness of the proposed approaches and show significant improvement over previous uplift modeling techniques. Most classification approaches aim at achieving high prediction accuracy on a given dataset. However, in most practical cases, some action, such as mailing an offer or treating a patient, is to be taken on the classified objects and we should model not the class probabilities themselves, but instead, the change in class probabilities caused by the action. The action should then be performed on those objects for which it will be most profitable. This problem is known as uplift modeling, differential response analysis or true lift modeling, but has received very little attention in Machine Learning literature. In the paper we present a tree based classifier tailored specifically to this task. To this end, we design new splitting criteria and pruning methods. The experiments confirm the usefulness of the proposed approach and show significant improvement over previous uplift modeling techniques. Internet display advertising is a critical revenue source for publishers and online content providers, and is supported by massive amounts of user and publisher data. Targeting display ads can be improved substantially with machine learning methods, but building many models on massive data becomes prohibitively expensive computationally. This paper presents a combination of strategies, deployed by the online advertising firm Dstillery, for learning many models from extremely high-dimensional data efficiently and without human intervention. This combination includes: (i) A method for simple-yet-effective transfer learning where a model learned from data that is relatively abundant and cheap is taken as a prior for Bayesian logistic regression trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) from the more expensive target data. (ii) A new update rule for automatic learning rate adaptation, to support learning from sparse, high-dimensional data, as well as the integration with adaptive regularization. We present an experimental analysis across 100 different ad campaigns, showing that the transfer learning indeed improves performance across a large number of them, especially at the start of the campaigns. The combined "hands-free" method needs no fiddling with the SGD learning rate, and we show that it is just as effective as using expensive grid search to set the regularization parameter for each campaign.