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Using Multi-armed Bandit to Solve Cold-Start Problems in Recommender Systems at Telco

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Mining Intelligence and Knowledge Exploration

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8891))

Abstract

Recommending best-fit rate-plans for new users is a challenge for the Telco industry. Rate-plans differ from most traditional products in the way that a user normally only have one product at any given time. This, combined with no background knowledge on new users hinders traditional recommender systems. Many Telcos today use either trivial approaches, such as picking a random plan or the most common plan in use. The work presented here shows that these methods perform poorly. We propose a new approach based on the multi-armed bandit algorithms to automatically recommend rate-plans for new users. An experiment is conducted on two different real-world datasets from two brands of a major international Telco operator showing promising results.

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Nguyen, H.T., Kofod-Petersen, A. (2014). Using Multi-armed Bandit to Solve Cold-Start Problems in Recommender Systems at Telco. In: Prasath, R., O’Reilly, P., Kathirvalavakumar, T. (eds) Mining Intelligence and Knowledge Exploration. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8891. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13817-6_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13817-6_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13816-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13817-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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