We consider the problem of efficiently constructing cheap and novel round trip flight itineraries by combining legs from different airlines. We analyse the factors that contribute towards the price of such itineraries and find that many result from the combination of just 30 of airlines and that the closer the departure of such itineraries is to the user's search date the more likely they are to be cheaper than the tickets from one airline. We use these insights to formulate the problem as a trade-off between the recall of cheap itinerary constructions and the costs associated with building them. We propose a supervised learning solution with location embeddings which achieves an AUC=80.48, a substantial improvement over simpler baselines. We discuss various practical considerations for dealing with the staleness and the stability of the model and present the design of the machine learning pipeline. Finally, we present an analysis of the model's performance in production and its impact on Skyscanner's users.
Traditional ways to model airline prices have been based on complex networks @cite_4 @cite_15 or various supervised machine learning models @cite_10 @cite_18 . A more recent trend is around incorporating neural embeddings to model location data. Embeddings have seen great success in natural language processing @cite_9 , modelling large graphs @cite_0 and there has been a spike of enthusiasm around applying neural embedding to geographic location context with a variety of papers focusing on: a) mining embeddings from sequences of locations @cite_13 @cite_8 @cite_17 @cite_8 ; b) modelling geographic context @cite_20 @cite_7 @cite_6 and c) using alternative neural architectures where location representations are learned while optimising towards particular applications @cite_20 and different approaches are mixed together in @cite_6 and @cite_7 . The practicalities of augmenting existing non-deep machine learning pipelines with neural embeddings are discussed in @cite_11 and in @cite_12 .
@cite_13 @cite_18 @cite_11 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_6 @cite_0 @cite_15 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_20 @cite_17
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Travel providers such as airlines and on-line travel agents are becoming more and more interested in understanding how passengers choose among alternative itineraries when searching for flights. This knowledge helps them better display and adapt their offer, taking into account market conditions and customer needs. Some common applications are not only filtering and sorting alternatives, but also changing certain attributes in real-time (e.g., changing the price). In this paper, we concentrate with the problem of modeling air passenger choices of flight itineraries. This problem has historically been tackled using classical Discrete Choice Modelling techniques. Traditional statistical approaches, in particular the Multinomial Logit model (MNL), is widely used in industrial applications due to its simplicity and general good performance. However, MNL models present several shortcomings and assumptions that might not hold in real applications. To overcome these difficulties, we present a new choice model based on Pointer Networks. Given an input sequence, this type of deep neural architecture combines Recurrent Neural Networks with the Attention Mechanism to learn the conditional probability of an output whose values correspond to positions in an input sequence. Therefore, given a sequence of different alternatives presented to a customer, the model can learn to point to the one most likely to be chosen by the customer. The proposed method was evaluated on a real dataset that combines on-line user search logs and airline flight bookings. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the traditional MNL model on several metrics. We present a novel approach to learning a point-wise, meaningful embedding for point-clouds in an unsupervised manner, through the use of neural-networks. The domain of point-cloud processing via neural-networks is rapidly evolving, with novel architectures and applications frequently emerging. Within this field of research, the availability and plethora of unlabeled point-clouds as well as their possible applications make finding ways of characterizing this type of data appealing. Though significant advancement was achieved in the realm of unsupervised learning, its adaptation to the point-cloud representation is not trivial. Previous research focuses on the embedding of entire point-clouds representing an object in a meaningful manner. We present a deep learning framework to learn point-wise description from a set of shapes without supervision. Our approach leverages self-supervision to define a relevant loss function to learn rich per-point features. We train a neural-network with objectives based on context derived directly from the raw data, with no added annotation. We use local structures of point-clouds to incorporate geometric information into each point's latent representation. In addition to using local geometric information, we encourage adjacent points to have similar representations and vice-versa, creating a smoother, more descriptive representation. We demonstrate the ability of our method to capture meaningful point-wise features through three applications. By clustering the learned embedding space, we perform unsupervised part-segmentation on point clouds. By calculating euclidean distance in the latent space we derive semantic point-analogies. Finally, by retrieving nearest-neighbors in our learned latent space we present meaningful point-correspondence within and among point-clouds. We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (, 2013) and TransE (, 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2 vs. 54.7 by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning. Deep neural networks have achieved impressive supervised classification performance in many tasks including image recognition, speech recognition, and sequence to sequence learning. However, this success has not been translated to applications like question answering that may involve complex arithmetic and logic reasoning. A major limitation of these models is in their inability to learn even simple arithmetic and logic operations. For example, it has been shown that neural networks fail to learn to add two binary numbers reliably. In this work, we propose Neural Programmer, an end-to-end differentiable neural network augmented with a small set of basic arithmetic and logic operations. Neural Programmer can call these augmented operations over several steps, thereby inducing compositional programs that are more complex than the built-in operations. The model learns from a weak supervision signal which is the result of execution of the correct program, hence it does not require expensive annotation of the correct program itself. The decisions of what operations to call, and what data segments to apply to are inferred by Neural Programmer. Such decisions, during training, are done in a differentiable fashion so that the entire network can be trained jointly by gradient descent. We find that training the model is difficult, but it can be greatly improved by adding random noise to the gradient. On a fairly complex synthetic table-comprehension dataset, traditional recurrent networks and attentional models perform poorly while Neural Programmer typically obtains nearly perfect accuracy.