论文标题
分类的新观点:最好将有限的资源分配给不确定的任务
A new perspective on classification: optimally allocating limited resources to uncertain tasks
论文作者
论文摘要
业务中的一个核心问题是,有限资源对一组可用任务的最佳分配,这些任务的回报本质上是不确定的。例如,在信用卡欺诈检测中,银行只能为其欺诈调查团队分配一小部分交易。通常,使用分类框架来解决此类问题,其中重点是预测一组特征的任务结果。然后将资源分配给预计最有可能成功的任务。但是,我们认为,使用分类来解决任务不确定性本质上是次优的,因为它没有考虑到可用的能力。因此,我们首先将问题视为一种分配问题。然后,我们通过学习直接优化分配的预期利润有限,随机能力来提出一种新颖的解决方案。这是通过优化净折扣累积收益的特定实例来实现的,该累计累积收益是一种通常在学习排名的指标类别。从经验上讲,我们证明,与各种应用领域和数据集的分类方法相比,我们的新方法可实现更高的预期利润和预期精度。这说明了综合方法的好处,并在学习预测模型时明确考虑可用资源的好处。
A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a small subset of transactions to their fraud investigations team. Typically, such problems are solved using a classification framework, where the focus is on predicting task outcomes given a set of characteristics. Resources are then allocated to the tasks that are predicted to be the most likely to succeed. However, we argue that using classification to address task uncertainty is inherently suboptimal as it does not take into account the available capacity. Therefore, we first frame the problem as a type of assignment problem. Then, we present a novel solution using learning to rank by directly optimizing the assignment's expected profit given limited, stochastic capacity. This is achieved by optimizing a specific instance of the net discounted cumulative gain, a commonly used class of metrics in learning to rank. Empirically, we demonstrate that our new method achieves higher expected profit and expected precision compared to a classification approach for a wide variety of application areas and data sets. This illustrates the benefit of an integrated approach and of explicitly considering the available resources when learning a predictive model.