The paper proposes replacing multiple horizon‑specific binary classifiers with a single survival model to predict time‑to‑repurchase in grocery e‑commerce. Empirical analysis shows a slightly decreasing hazard (k≈0.9) and that a Log‑Normal model best fits marginal distributions while Weibull best fits residuals. A single Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model matches or surpasses per‑horizon classifiers with fewer trees, and a 4‑parameter calibration maps survival CDFs to horizon probabilities without monotonicity violations, revealing a trade‑off between calibration and ranking within the AFT family.
By Akshay Kekuda, Shreeranjani Srirangamsridharan, Ishan Bhatt, Yanan Cao, Sinduja Subramaniam, Evren Korpeoglu, Kaushiki Nag, Kannan Achan
arXiv:2602. 12972v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In online advertising, marketing interventions such as coupons introduce significant confounding bias into Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction.
By Siyun Yang, Shixiao Yang, Jian Wang, Di Fan, Kehe Cai, Haoyan Fu, Jiaming Zhang, Wenjin Wu, Peng Jiang
arXiv:2511. 07280v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Personalized recommendation systems shape much of user choice online, yet their targeted nature makes separating out the value of recommendation and the underlying goods challenging.
By Kevin Zielnicki, Guy Aridor, Aur\'elien Bibaut, Allen Tran, Winston Chou, Nathan Kallus
The paper introduces the Behavior-to-Value (B2V) task, which seeks to identify consumer values from e-commerce behavioral trajectories. It presents the E-commerce Consumption Value Taxonomy (ECVT) and the B2V-Bench dataset, derived from anonymized Taobao logs and covering 25 purchase behaviors with associated value orientations. A new model, B2V-Verifier, is proposed to improve value measurement accuracy, achieving a 34% boost in multi-label classification over strong LLM baselines.
By Peixuan Hou, Bin Chen, Li He, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiuli Ma, Guojie Song
The paper introduces a counterfactual observability framework for Netflix’s recommender systems, aiming to disentangle raw engagement signals—such as views and clicks—from confounding factors like content quality, model behavior, presentation bias, and audience reach. It proposes three stakeholder‑centered principles and measurement methods that reduce bias, assess relativity, and capture incrementality, applicable to both single‑stage and cascading recommender architectures. The framework is demonstrated through multiple production deployments, showing its effectiveness in enhancing observability across Netflix’s recommendation pipelines.
By Chaoran Guo, Ding Tong, Ting-Po Lee, Scarlet Chen
The study evaluates whether large language models (LLMs) used as synthetic personas can predict real audience responses to marketing copy. Using thousands of headline A/B tests from the Upworthy Research Archive, the authors compare a ten-persona panel grounded in real audience demographics to a no-persona zero‑shot baseline that asks the model for a typical reader’s click likelihood. Results show that the no‑persona baseline outperforms the persona‑based approach, with higher predictive validity and top‑1 accuracy, indicating that forcing the model to role‑play specific personas introduces bias and noise.
By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano