Ranking Items by the Current-Preferences and Profits: A List-wise Learning-to-Rank Approach to Profit Maximization

Abstract

In e-commerce platforms, profit-aware recommender systems aim to improve the platform’s profits while maintaining high overall accuracy by recommending items with high profits as top-ranked items. We explore two issues faced by existing model-based profit-aware approaches (i.e., MBAs) when training recommendation models for profit enhancement. First, existing MBAs tend to inaccurately infer the item ranking without considering the user’s current preference for each item through their profit-based weighting scheme. Second, through the point-wise learning-to-rank (LTR), the model is optimized solely for the preference score of each item independently rather than being directly optimized for the overall ranking of items. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel MBA that involves three key steps: (S1) defining the Current Preference incorporated with Profit (i.e., CPP) for items; (S2) classifying items through CPP; and (S3) training the model by list-wise LTR based on CPP. Extensive experimental results using real-world platform datasets demonstrate that our approach improves accuracy by approximately 4% and profits by about 24% compared to the best-competing method.