Biblio

Recommender systems are typically evaluated on their ability to provide items that satisfy the needs and interests of the end user. However, in many real world applications, users are not the only stakeholders involved. There may be a variety of individuals or organizations that benefit in different ways from the delivery of recommendations. In this paper, we re-define the recommender system as a multistakeholder environment in which different stakeholders are served by delivering recommendations, and we suggest a utility-based approach to evaluating recommendations in such an environment that is capable of distinguishing among the distributions of utility delivered to different stakeholders.

Multi-touch attribution, which allows distributing the credit to all related advertisements based on their corresponding contributions, has recently become an important research topic in digital advertising. Traditionally, rule-based attribution models have been used in practice. The drawback of such rule-based models lies in the fact that the rules are not derived form the data but only based on simple intuition. With the ever enhanced capability to tracking advertisement and users' interaction with the advertisement, data-driven multi-touch attribution models, which attempt to infer the contribution from user interaction data, become an important research direction. We here propose a new data-driven attribution model based on survival theory. By adopting a probabilistic framework, one key advantage of the proposed model is that it is able to remove the presentation biases inherit to most of the other attribution models. In addition to model the attribution, the proposed model is also able to predict user's 'conversion' probability. We validate the proposed method with a real-world data set obtained from a operational commercial advertising monitoring company. Experiment results have shown that the proposed method is quite promising in both conversion prediction and attribution.