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Main Authors: Gugulothu, Narendhar, Bhat, Sanjay P., Bodas, Tejas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05428
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author Gugulothu, Narendhar
Bhat, Sanjay P.
Bodas, Tejas
author_facet Gugulothu, Narendhar
Bhat, Sanjay P.
Bodas, Tejas
contents While mixture density networks (MDNs) have been extensively used for regression tasks, they have not been used much for classification tasks. One reason for this is that the usability of MDNs for classification is not clear and straightforward. In this paper, we propose two MDN-based models for classification tasks. Both models fit mixtures of Gaussians to the the data and use the fitted distributions to classify a given sample by evaluating the learnt cumulative distribution function for the given input features. While the proposed MDN-based models perform slightly better than, or on par with, five baseline classification models on three publicly available datasets, the real utility of our models comes out through a real-world product bundling application. Specifically, we use our MDN-based models to learn the willingness-to-pay (WTP) distributions for two products from synthetic sales data of the individual products. The Gaussian mixture representation of the learnt WTP distributions is then exploited to obtain the WTP distribution of the bundle consisting of both the products. The proposed MDN-based models are able to approximate the true WTP distributions of both products and the bundle well.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05428
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixture Density Networks for Classification with an Application to Product Bundling
Gugulothu, Narendhar
Bhat, Sanjay P.
Bodas, Tejas
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
While mixture density networks (MDNs) have been extensively used for regression tasks, they have not been used much for classification tasks. One reason for this is that the usability of MDNs for classification is not clear and straightforward. In this paper, we propose two MDN-based models for classification tasks. Both models fit mixtures of Gaussians to the the data and use the fitted distributions to classify a given sample by evaluating the learnt cumulative distribution function for the given input features. While the proposed MDN-based models perform slightly better than, or on par with, five baseline classification models on three publicly available datasets, the real utility of our models comes out through a real-world product bundling application. Specifically, we use our MDN-based models to learn the willingness-to-pay (WTP) distributions for two products from synthetic sales data of the individual products. The Gaussian mixture representation of the learnt WTP distributions is then exploited to obtain the WTP distribution of the bundle consisting of both the products. The proposed MDN-based models are able to approximate the true WTP distributions of both products and the bundle well.
title Mixture Density Networks for Classification with an Application to Product Bundling
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05428