Customer profiling

Idea

Data structure for real time parallel customer profiliation. Pretargeting, offer optimization, data structure, segmentation.

Learning segment performancees

During a web session the parameters, p_i, which can be used for segmenting the audience are: Environement parameters and ancillary offers.

• behaviour: returning, history, speed
• item: which product from the list
• time: till usage, booking time frame (h/d/m/y)
• source: referrer, searched words, social
• location: nation, landscape, quarter, company, weather
• session: browser, view, device, provider
• class: quality class among similar products
• travel/specific: type of group traveling, origin and destination

A learning process can be done correlating the performance of each teaser with the presence of a certain variable, e.g. via a naïve Baysian approach: $$ P(t|p_1,p_2,p_3,\ldots) = \frac{P(t)P(p_1|t)P(p_2|t)P(p_3|t)\ldots}{P(p_1,p_2,p_3,\ldots)} $$ Where P(t|p₁,p₂,p₃,…) is the a posteriori probability of a teaser performance for a given presence of the paramters p_i.

Since the number of parameters is around 1000/2000 this process is very inefficient and requires a large learning phase. Most of the environmental variables are correlated and should be hence clamped into macro environemental variables findinf the few functions that define an efficient session scoring. A big correlation matrix between all parameters should create a comprehensive hit map to guide the simplification and dimensional reduction of the parameter space. Second, some parameters shold be more influent in changing the teaser response and a correspondent ``learning weight’’ should be assigned to each parameter.

Touchpoint crossing

Offer performances should be tracked over different touchpoints to understand which options is the customer considering throughout his journey. Negative offer performances are as well really important to gain information about the customer.

Customer journey, in red are listed offered product, in orange potential product, in black alternative decisions.

During a journey the customer has to take different decisions and decline an offer might be an important source of information about how he is confindent in the city he is visiting. For many biforcation points of his route we can consider a payoff matrix like: $$ \begin{array}{c c c} & disturbing & non-disturbing\\ available & a_{11}|b_{11} & a_{12}|b_{12}\\ non-available & a_{21}|b_{21} & a_{22}|b_{22}\\ \end{array} $$ Generally a₁₁, a₁₂, b₁₂, b₂₂ are negative. The determination of these parameters allow the estimation of a score about the customer/city link.

Pretargeting

Self-consistent mask filtered web marketing

A set of semantic labels or categories (around 20) {l₁, …, l_Nl} that represent a target audience. Labels concern audience whishes/interests and product properties, categories might be: amusement, trend, luxus, tech, use At the beginning each ad is tagged with a percentage of each label according to the opinion of the marketer. Up) representation of a label on the 2d plane. Down) collection of all labels for ads and web sites and interpolated figure.

$$ a_1 = \{f_1l_1,\ldots,f_{N_l}l_{N_l}\} \qquad \sum_i^{N_l}f_i = 1 $$ The same is done for the web site according to the document analytic $$ w_1 = \{f_1l_1,\ldots,f_{N_l}l_{N_l}\} \qquad \sum_i^{N_l}f_i = 1 $$ Each label has a representation on a 2d plane, like arouse-valence plane (the 1d formulation is as well a good alternative). l_i = b₁v₁ + b₂v₂   b₁, b₂ < 1 The points might be alternatively regularly placed on a 2d grid. For each ad and web page we create a mask fitting the points with a Gaussian function.

Mask

The mask is the central concept of this method, it consists in 20-30 3d points (x,y,z) that are interpolated via a 2d Gaussian. The mask might include in total 100$$100 points but the essential information is stored in few tens. For each mask i we integrate its orthogonal values v_xⁱ = ∫xf(x,y)dxdy   v_yⁱ = ∫yf(x,y)dxdy We represent all the masks as points on a 2d plane and perform a Delauney triangulation (no need to calculate correlation matrices, highly parallel) to isolate clusters. Clusters can be detected via expectation-maximization algorithm. Representation of a mask on a 2d plane and consequent clustering analysis on the data on the graph. Each cluster is separated by a hull and for each cluster the average mask is calculated.

For each cluster we calculate the average mask and a list of web pages or ads that belong to that cluster.

Peripherical (parallel)

From each cookie we read the information about the web sites and the ads clicked and create a user experience mask obtained by the sum of all web and ad masks. Creation of the user experience mask as sum of ad and web relevance.

We perform a convolution with the cluster masks and select the best fitting opportunities. The best fit might be taken as well as the energy of the system, i.e. the energy closer to the largest value (L_x × L_y) is token. We show an ad on the web page currently viewed by the user by taking an ad randomly from the set of ads that belong to that mask. Each separated computing unit communicates the user experience matrix and the the user preferences to the central unit.

{"user":[
     "id" : 10245,
     "userexp":[],
     "webuse":[],
     "aduse":[]
]}

melody convolution

The computer unit stores information about the user

{"user":[
    "id" : 10245,
    "webvisited": [],
    "advisted": [],
    "adseen":[],
    "update":,
    "norm_weight":456732456
]}

The ``normweight’’, n_w, number is used for normalization: if the next mask has weight 1 the former mask is multiplied by (n_w+1)/n_w while the adding mask by 1/n_w.

Central

The central unit computes all the user information assigning to each user experience matrix two vectors. Once the points are updated on the graph performs a cluster analysis and refine the web and ad masks. The new masks and ad lists are communicated to the external units after the calculation. Under convergence of points into separated clusters we perform coarse-graining of the information and we define each cluster as a hull. Each hull represents a different graph database to speed up the computation.

{"cluster":[
    "id" : 102,
    "hull_border": [],
    "u_mask": [],
    "db_address":,
]}

Each cluster can be separately processed.

Infrastructure

Each external unit process the information about a single user with no communication required among different units. Structure of the different computing units and the period segmentation. In the graph are shown the information during the map and the reduce phase.

The central unit computes the masks and communicate the new values to each of the external unit in an asynchronous time. The external units are completely autonomous and the calculation time of the new masks do not affect the response time of the system. The masks can be time dependent and different sets of masks might be selected depending on the hour of the day or the day of the week.

Scalability

Given: 50M users, 10G views, 1M url, 10k pages r_CPO 10/order r_CPC 1/click r_CPM 1/1000views calc time 20ms, 50k calc/s. The calculations are meant to be performed on the native machine via python or c++ code. The cookies are text analysed after the last update, the masks relative to the visited web site or ad are added to the user experience mask. During the update phase the new user’s mask is mapped into the central unit and the new information are updated in the graph. Typical graph database per 1M users (ref: pet project.

According to the performances of Neo4j there should be no large computing time required to precess 50M nodes but different levels of coarse-graining might be introduced in the graph to improve performances. That means that different databases might be used to compute different magnification of the graph.

Revenue/bidding

We know the ad visibility, the page visited and the ad selection. revenue figures

We construct the cumulative probability of the revenue summing up each single revenue $$ r_{tot} = \sum_i^3 f_ir_i \qquad i \in \{CPO,CPC,CPM\} $$ Where r_i is the revenue of the offer and f_i its frequency. We use a random number uniformly distributed, u, to select the offer $$ r_l = \frac{\sum_i^l f_ir_i}{r_{tot}} \qquad P(l|u) = P(u<r_{l-1} \& u\geq r_{l}) $$

Refinement

To each ad, i, can be set a number that represents the distance of the ad mask to the average cluster mask, d_cⁱ. The ad, instead of being selected with a random probability, might be selected using the cumulative probability of the sum of the distance from the center. $$ d_c = \sum_i^{N_{ad}}d_c^{i} \qquad d_c^l =\frac{\sum_i^{l}d_c^{i}}{d_c} \qquad P(l|u) = P(u<d_c^{l-1} \& u\geq d_c^{l}) $$ Where u is a random uniform number. ## Interest filtering

User grouping can be used to let new user filter information about complex content in a web site. Filtering dash based on user grouping

The dash represents the same categories calculated by user grouping and let the user filter the information by populating the dash.

Customer feedback score

One of the scoring parameter for a customer is the analysis of the feedbacks he writes in different channels.

Specific customer feeedbacks were used to train dictionaries for the association of some keywords to specific arguments of sentiments.

Training of dictionary for topic and sentiment recognition.

The training of the dictionaries is really important for understanding the sentiment of the customer and extract the most relevant words. Those words can be connected to a particular sentiment.
The customers were asked to choose a category and rate their satisfaction to each comment. We had then the chance to create topic and sentiment specific dictionaries to be able to automatic guess by user input the most probable reason of his feedback. We run an emotion recognition to understand which words are more common to different topics.

Distribution of sentence length, statistical communality between months.

We have analyzed as well the clustering and the correlation between words to see whether it was necessary to clamp words together or to assign a cluster number to the words. It is as well important to read general statistical properties of the comment to recognize whether they are formally similar.

Distribution of sentence length, communality between months, distribution of sentence length, statistical communality between months.

In this case we can correlate time periods together to understand which topic are more interesting in particular time of the year.

Appendix

Information flux in online sale

Following the thermodynamic example the Gibbs free energy is:

G = U + PV − SΔT

if we want to translate this concept in terms of business we can say that revenue is the sum of the {} sold, the {} done and the {}. Sale has a major role the revenue that comes from the first two parts but a proper sale strategy can increase a significant gain in information. In the following we propose a sale oriented strategy with large focus on customer information gain.

Sketch of the infrastructure and customer information flow.

Throughout this document we are going to analyze some branches of this sketch.

Anonymous offer optimization

Session variables

We consider a session as our variable x, for each session we can define a function g(x) that defines the revenue in the session. g(x) is defined as the sum of the acquired services, we define the ticket, t, as the main product and all other products, {a₁, a₂, a₃, a₄, …}, are ``attached’’ to the ticket. g(x) = w_tf_t(x) + ∑_{i ∈ {a}}w_if_i(x) where w is the margin for each sale and f the frequency of sale per session. We assume that the probability, p, of an ancillary sale is always conditioned by the ticket sale. $$ p_a := p(a|t) = \frac{p(a)p(t|a)}{p(t)}=\frac{p(a)}{p(t)} \qquad p(t|a) = 1 $$ where p is the probability correspondent to the frequency f. The metric m is the {} defined as the path to a {}. The straightes metric for the booking is: ProductList − ItemSelection − CustomerDetail − Payment The formulation of the ticket booking frequency f_t is: f_t = f_list ⋅ f_it ⋅ f_cd ⋅ f_book where we call f_st the frequency of a generic step conversion. When the booking comes from an external campaign an additional frequency is added: f_t = (1−bouncerate) ⋅ f_list ⋅ f_it ⋅ f_cd ⋅ f_book ## Variant testing If we split a page into different variants we influence the frequency of the conversion step: $$ f_{st} \to \left\{\begin{array}{c} f^a\\f^b\end{array}\right. $$ We perform a time average of the two frequencies, $\mean{f^a}_t$, $\mean{f^b}_t$ and find the winning variant performing a t-test $$ t_{test} = \frac{\mean{f^a}_t - \mean{f^b}_t}{\sqrt{s_a/N_a + s_b/N_b}} $$ Where N_a and N_b are the sample sizes and s_a and s_b are the standard deviation of the correspondent frequencies and follow a χ² distribution. If the difference between state a and state b consists in more than a single change we should consider the influence of each of the M element changes: $$ T^2 = \frac{N_aN_b}{N_a+N_b}(\bra{\bar a} - \bra{\bar b}) \mathrm{Cov}_{ab}^{-1}(\ket{\bar a} - \ket{\bar b}) $$ where Cov_ab is the sample covariance matrix $$ \mathrm{Cov}_{ab} := \frac{1}{N_a+N_b-2} \sum_{i=1}^{N_a} \Big((\ket{a}_i - \ket{\bar a})(\bra{a}_i - \bra{\bar a}) + (\ket{b}_i - \ket{\bar b})(\bra{b}_i - \bra{\bar b})\Big) $$

Probability distribution

The correspondent probability of a number of conversions, n_c, in a day i, for an action x_a, follows the Poisson distribution: (Γ(k) = (k−1)!) $$ p_{st}(n_c,t;\lambda) = \frac{(\lambda t)^{n_c}}{n_c!}e^{-(\lambda t)} $$ which is comparable to a Gaussian distribution with $\sigma = \sqrt{\lambda t}$ for λt ≥ 10.

The probability distribution of a data set {n_c} is: $$ P_g(\{n_c\}) = \prod_{i=1}^N \frac1{\sqrt{2\pi n_i}}e^{-\frac{(n_i-\lambda_it_i)^2}{2n_c}} $$ The fitting parameter, λ_it_i, can be determined by minimizing the χ². $$ \chi^2 = \sum_{i=1}^{N_d}\frac{(n_i-\lambda_i t_i)^2}{n_i} $$ since for Poisson distributions σ_i² = n_i. If we instead measure a continous quantity attached to the action (e.g. price, x_p) we can consider a Gaussian distribution $$ p_{st}(x_p) = \frac{1}{\sigma_p\sqrt{2\pi}} e^{-\frac{(x_p-\bar{x_p})}{2\sigma^2_p}} $$

Metric noise propagation

We have defined the frequency of bookings f_t as the product of frequencies per conversion step. $$ f_t = f_{list} f_{it} f_{cd} f_{book} = f_1 f_2 f_3 f_4 \qquad f_t \simeq f^0_t + \sum_{i=1}^4 tial_i f_t \cdot \Delta f_i $$ The error of the total conversion propagates as follow: $$ s_t^2 = \mean{f_t - \mean{f_t}}^2 = \sum_{i=1}^4 (tial_i f_t)^2 s_i^2 = f_t^2 \sum_{i=1}^4 (s_i^2/f_i^2) $$ Where we have assumed that cross correlations s₁₂, s₁₃, s₁₄, … are all zero because of statistical independence of the different pages since no test is extended on another page. That implies that the less noisy metrics are short and defined across simple pages (few biforcation). The typical noise generated from a Poisson process is the shot noise, which is a white noise and it’s power spectrum depends on the intensity of the signal. The signal to noise ratio of a shot noise is $\mu/\sigma=\sqrt{N}$. To filter out the noise we have to study the autocorrelation function of the time series $$ corr_{f_t}(x) = \sum_{y=-\infty}^\infty f_t(y)f_t(y-x) \simeq f_0 e^{-cx} %\mathrm{or} f_0\left(1-\frac{x}{c}\right) $$ Being a white noise we can clean the signal removing the null component of the Fourier transform: $$ f_{clean}(x) = \int \left( \hat f(k) - \frac1\pi\int_\pi^\pi f(x) dx\right) e^{-2\pi\imath xk}dk $$ All the different variants of the tests (e.g. languages) should have a comparable power spectrum.

Offer rotation

Another important parameter is the {} which can be defined as q(x) := q(x|G_p,G_w,C_l,S_p) Which is a function depending on the scores: * G_p Expenditure capability (maximum budget) * G_w Expenditure willingness (flexibility in acquiring services) * N_p Network potential (influence on other travelers) * C_l Customer loyability (persistance in booking) * S_p Information Gain A possible definition of those quantities is: $$ G_p := max(g) \qquad G_w := \frac{|g_t - g_{tot}|}{g_{tot}} \qquad C_l := \frac{t_{x}}{\bar t}\frac{m_{x}}{\bar m} \qquad S_p := \sum_i p_i\log\frac1{p_i} $$ Where p_i is the ratio between teaser conversion and teaser generation. Session quality is an important score for session