Evgeniy M. Ozhegov

Evgeniy M. Ozhegov, Alina Ozhegova

This paper describes the results of research project on optimal pricing for LLC "Perm Local Rail Company". In this study we propose a regression tree based approach for estimation of demand function for local rail tickets considering high degree of demand heterogeneity by various trip directions and the goals of travel. Employing detailed data on ticket sales for 5 years we estimate the parameters of demand function and reveal the significant variation in price elasticity of demand. While in average the demand is elastic by price, near a quarter of trips is characterized by weakly elastic demand. Lower elasticity of demand is correlated with lower degree of competition with other transport and inflexible frequency of travel.

Evgeniy M. Ozhegov, Daria Teterina

Many economic applications including optimal pricing and inventory management requires prediction of demand based on sales data and estimation of sales reaction to a price change. There is a wide range of econometric approaches which are used to correct a bias in estimates of demand parameters on censored sales data. These approaches can also be applied to various classes of machine learning models to reduce the prediction error of sales volume. In this study we construct two ensemble models for demand prediction with and without accounting for demand censorship. Accounting for sales censorship is based on the idea of censored quantile regression method where the model estimation is splitted on two separate parts: a) prediction of zero sales by classification model; and b) prediction of non-zero sales by regression model. Models with and without accounting for censorship are based on the predictions aggregations of Least squares, Ridge and Lasso regressions and Random Forest model. Having estimated the predictive properties of both models, we empirically test the best predictive power of the model that takes into account the censored nature of demand. We also show that machine learning method with censorship accounting provide bias corrected estimates of demand sensitivity for price change similar to econometric models.