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Autori principali: Luo, Shanshan, Wu, Peng, Geng, Zhi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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Accesso online:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20318
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author Luo, Shanshan
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
author_facet Luo, Shanshan
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
contents Online advertising aims to increase user engagement and maximize revenue, but users respond heterogeneously to ad exposure. Some users purchase only when exposed to ads, while others purchase regardless of exposure, and still others never purchase. This heterogeneity can be characterized by latent response types, commonly referred to as principal strata, defined by users' joint potential outcomes under exposure and non-exposure. However, users' true strata are unobserved, making direct analysis infeasible. In this article, instead of learning the true strata, we propose a novel approach that learns users' pseudo-strata by leveraging information from an outcome (revenue) observed after the response (purchase). We construct pseudo-strata to classify users and introduce misclassification rewards to quantify the expected revenue gain of pseudo-strata-based policies relative to true strata. Within a Bayesian classification framework, we learn the pseudo-strata by optimizing the expected revenue. To implement these procedures, we introduce identification assumptions and estimation methods, and establish their large-sample properties. Simulation studies show that the proposed method achieves more accurate strata classification and substantially higher revenue than baselines. We further illustrate the method using a large-scale industrial dataset from the Criteo Predictive Search Platform.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pseudo-strata learning via maximizing misclassification reward
Luo, Shanshan
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
Methodology
Online advertising aims to increase user engagement and maximize revenue, but users respond heterogeneously to ad exposure. Some users purchase only when exposed to ads, while others purchase regardless of exposure, and still others never purchase. This heterogeneity can be characterized by latent response types, commonly referred to as principal strata, defined by users' joint potential outcomes under exposure and non-exposure. However, users' true strata are unobserved, making direct analysis infeasible. In this article, instead of learning the true strata, we propose a novel approach that learns users' pseudo-strata by leveraging information from an outcome (revenue) observed after the response (purchase). We construct pseudo-strata to classify users and introduce misclassification rewards to quantify the expected revenue gain of pseudo-strata-based policies relative to true strata. Within a Bayesian classification framework, we learn the pseudo-strata by optimizing the expected revenue. To implement these procedures, we introduce identification assumptions and estimation methods, and establish their large-sample properties. Simulation studies show that the proposed method achieves more accurate strata classification and substantially higher revenue than baselines. We further illustrate the method using a large-scale industrial dataset from the Criteo Predictive Search Platform.
title Pseudo-strata learning via maximizing misclassification reward
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20318