Scaling and Optimizing Consumer Tech Products with Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms: Applications in eCommerce

Authors

  • Siddharth Gupta IEEE Senior, USA Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32628/CSEIT251112370

Keywords:

Multi-Armed Bandit Algorithms, eCommerce Optimization, Personalized Recommendations, Dynamic Pricing, Ethical AI in Retail

Abstract

This article explores the application of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms in optimizing consumer tech products, with a particular focus on eCommerce platforms. It provides a comprehensive article overview of the theoretical framework behind MAB algorithms, including the exploration-exploitation trade-off and comparisons with traditional A/B testing methods. The article delves into various MAB strategies commonly used in eCommerce, such as epsilon-greedy, Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), and Thompson Sampling, and examines their applications in personalized product recommendations, dynamic pricing, ad placement optimization, and website content delivery. Implementation considerations, including integration with existing machine learning infrastructure and data processing in high-throughput scenarios, are discussed in detail. The article also addresses the impact of MAB algorithms on key performance metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, and revenue optimization. Ethical considerations, including transparency in automated decision-making and fairness in consumer-facing applications, are explored. Finally, the article presents case studies of successful implementations, discusses current challenges and limitations, and outlines future directions for MAB algorithms in eCommerce and potential cross-industry applications.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Xiang, Ding & West, Becky & Wang, Jiaqi & Cui, Xiquan & Huang, Jinzhou. (2021). Adaptively Optimize Content Recommendation Using Multi Armed Bandit Algorithms in E-commerce. 10.48550/arXiv.2108.01440. [Online] Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2108.01440

Burtini, G., Loeppky, J., & Lawrence, R. (2015). A Survey of Online Experiment Design with the Stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit. arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.00757. https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.00757

Chapelle, O., & Li, L. (2011). An Empirical Evaluation of Thompson Sampling. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 24, 2249-2257. https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2011/file/e53a0a2978c28872a4505bdb51db06dc-Paper.pdf

Ie, E., Jain, V., Wang, J., Narvekar, S., Agarwal, R., Wu, R., Cheng, H., Lustman, M., Gatto, V., Covington, P., McFadden, J., Chandra, T., & Boutilier, C. (2019). Reinforcement Learning for Slate-based Recommender Systems: A Tractable Decomposition and Practical Methodology. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.12767. https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12767

Agarwal, A., Bird, S., Cozowicz, M., Hoang, L., Langford, J., Lee, S., Li, J., Melamed, D., Oshri, G., Ribas, O., Sen, S., & Slivkins, A. (2016). Making Contextual Decisions with Low Technical Debt. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.03966. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.03966

Schwartz, E. M., Bradlow, E. T., & Fader, P. S. (2017). Customer Acquisition via Display Advertising Using Multi-Armed Bandit Experiments. Marketing Science, 36(4), 500-522. https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mksc.2016.1023

Wu, Wei, Youlin Huang, and Lixian Qian. "Social trust and algorithmic equity: The societal perspectives of users' intention to interact with algorithm recommendation systems." Decision Support Systems 178 (2024): 114115.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167923623001902

Haibin Cheng and Erick Cantú-Paz. 04 February 2010. Personalized click prediction in sponsored search. Proceedings of the third ACM international conference on Web search and data mining (WSDM '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 351–360. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718487.1718531

D. Bouneffouf, I. Rish and C. Aggarwal, "Survey on Applications of Multi-Armed and Contextual Bandits," 2020 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), Glasgow, UK, 19-24 July 2020, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/CEC48606.2020.9185782. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9185782

Li, L., Chu, W., Langford, J., & Schapire, R. E. (2010). A Contextual-Bandit Approach to Personalized News Article Recommendation. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, 661-670. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1772690.1772758

Bouneffouf, D., & Rish, I. (2019). A Survey on Practical Applications of Multi-Armed and Contextual Bandits. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.10040. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.10040

Downloads

Published

03-03-2025

Issue

Section

Research Articles