Exact and heuristic methods for personalized display advertising in virtual reality platforms

Kemal Kilic; Menekse G. Saygi; Semih O. Sezer

doi:10.3934/jimo.2018073

Article Contents

2019, Volume 15, Issue 2: 833-854. Doi: 10.3934/jimo.2018073

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Exact and heuristic methods for personalized display advertising in virtual reality platforms

Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Sabanci University, Istanbul, 34956, Turkey

* Corresponding author: Kemal Kilic
* Corresponding author: Kemal Kilic

Received: October 2016

Revised: December 2017

Early access: June 2018

Published: January 2019

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Abstract

In this paper, motivated from a real problem faced by an online Virtual Reality (VR) platform provider, we study a personalized advertisement assignment problem. In this platform users log in/out and change their virtual locations. A number of advertisers are willing to pay for ad locations to reach these users. Every time a user visits a new location, the company displays one of the ads. At the end of a fixed time horizon, a reward is collected which depends on the number of ads of each advertiser displayed to different users. The objective is to assign ads dynamically to maximize the expected reward. The problem is studied in a framework where the behaviors of users are modeled with two-state continuous-time Markov processes. We describe two exact and four heuristic algorithms. We compare these algorithms and conduct a sensitivity analysis over problem and algorithm specific parameters. These are the main contributions of the current paper. Exact algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality, hence, heuristic methods might be considered instead in some cases. However, exact methods can also be used as part of heuristics since the experimental analysis demonstrates that they are robust for parameters that influence the computational requirements.

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Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 90C40; Secondary: 90C39.

Citation:

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Figure 1. The sample mean revenues of the six algorithms for varying number of replications in Experiment 111

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Figure 2. Computed expected revenues (ER) and the sample mean revenues (SMR) obtained for various L = 1/h values for the finite difference algorithm in Experiment #111

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Figure 3. Computed expected revenues determined at each iteration (that is, $n \mapsto U_n$) for the value iteration algorithms with different resolution parameter values in Experiment # 111

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Figure 4. Computed expected revenues determined by the value iteration algorithm after 40 iterations for different resolution parameter values in Experiment #111

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Figure 5. The computational time in days for the value iteration algorithm with iteration number = 40, for different resolution parameter values in Experiment 111

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Figure 6. The expected revenues determined by the value iteration algorithm with iteration number = 40, for different resolution parameter values in Experiment 111

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Figure 7. The sample mean revenues (SMRs) determined by the finite difference algorithm for different h-value in Experiment 111

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Table 1. Parameters for numerical experiments

Problem Specific Parameters	Algorithm Specific Parameters
Problem Size	$h$ value
Initial States	Iteration Number
Transition Rates	Resolution (i.e., Step Length in Time)
$\beta$-probabilities
Exposure Payment Matrix
Min./Max. Display Constraint
Min./Max. Payment Constraint

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Table 2. Experimental Conditions

Experiment #	Maximum Display	Minimum Payment	Maximum Payment
111	5	10	40
112	5	10	70
121	5	30	40
122	5	30	70
211	8	10	40
212	8	10	70
221	8	30	40
222	8	30	70

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Table 3. Revenue performance of the algorithms for different experimental conditions

	Heuristics				Finite Difference		Value Iteration
Exp.#	A	B	C	Random	SMR	ER	SMR	ER
111	32.25	45.46	42.24	28.83	45.93	45.57	45.90	44.57
112	32.69	45.99	42.24	28.99	46.47	46.01	46.49	45.01
121	13.28	14.86	9.54	9.70	30.75	30.46	30.79	29.61
122	13.82	15.40	9.54	9.86	33.71	33.38	33.64	32.35
211	33.81	49.55	49.13	29.71	49.63	49.27	49.62	48.16
212	35.28	49.85	49.34	30.11	49.89	49.55	49.91	48.46
221	15.66	31.44	30.75	11.52	34.80	34.36	34.85	33.17
222	17.00	31.75	30.96	11.92	39.94	39.90	39.90	38.55

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