Alix Lhéritier

Alix Lhéritier, Nicolas Bondoux

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) extends the value-based approach by approximating the full distribution over future returns instead of the mean only, providing a richer signal that leads to improved performances. Quantile Regression (QR) based methods like QR-DQN project arbitrary distributions into a parametric subset of staircase distributions by minimizing the 1-Wasserstein distance. However, due to biases in the gradients, the quantile regression loss is used instead for training, guaranteeing the same minimizer and enjoying unbiased gradients. Non-crossing constraints on the quantiles have been shown to improve the performance of QR-DQN for uncertainty-based exploration strategies. The contribution of this work is in the setting of fixed quantile levels and is twofold. First, we prove that the Cramér distance yields a projection that coincides with the 1-Wasserstein one and that, under non-crossing constraints, the squared Cramér and the quantile regression losses yield collinear gradients, shedding light on the connection between these important elements of DRL. Second, we propose a low complexity algorithm to compute the Cramér distance.

Alix Lhéritier

Pairwise Choice Markov Chains (PCMC) have been recently introduced to overcome limitations of choice models based on traditional axioms unable to express empirical observations from modern behavior economics like context effects occurring when a choice between two options is altered by adding a third alternative. The inference approach that estimates the transition rates between each possible pair of alternatives via maximum likelihood suffers when the examples of each alternative are scarce and is inappropriate when new alternatives can be observed at test time. In this work, we propose an amortized inference approach for PCMC by embedding its definition into a neural network that represents transition rates as a function of the alternatives' and individual's features. We apply our construction to the complex case of airline itinerary booking where singletons are common (due to varying prices and individual-specific itineraries), and context effects and behaviors strongly dependent on market segments are observed. Experiments show our network significantly outperforming, in terms of prediction accuracy and logarithmic loss, feature engineered standard and latent class Multinomial Logit models as well as recent machine learning approaches.

Alix Lhéritier, Frédéric Cazals

We propose a novel nonparametric online predictor for discrete labels conditioned on multivariate continuous features. The predictor is based on a feature space discretization induced by a full-fledged k-d tree with randomly picked directions and a recursive Bayesian distribution, which allows to automatically learn the most relevant feature scales characterizing the conditional distribution. We prove its pointwise universality, i.e., it achieves a normalized log loss performance asymptotically as good as the true conditional entropy of the labels given the features. The time complexity to process the $n$-th sample point is $O(\log n)$ in probability with respect to the distribution generating the data points, whereas other exact nonparametric methods require to process all past observations. Experiments on challenging datasets show the computational and statistical efficiency of our algorithm in comparison to standard and state-of-the-art methods.

Alejandro Mottini, Alix Lheritier, Rodrigo Acuna-Agost

Passenger Name Records (PNRs) are at the heart of the travel industry. Created when an itinerary is booked, they contain travel and passenger information. It is usual for airlines and other actors in the industry to inter-exchange and access each other's PNR, creating the challenge of using them without infringing data ownership laws. To address this difficulty, we propose a method to generate realistic synthetic PNRs using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unlike other GAN applications, PNRs consist of categorical and numerical features with missing/NaN values, which makes the use of GANs challenging. We propose a solution based on Cramér GANs, categorical feature embedding and a Cross-Net architecture. The method was tested on a real PNR dataset, and evaluated in terms of distribution matching, memorization, and performance of predictive models for two real business problems: client segmentation and passenger nationality prediction. Results show that the generated data matches well with the real PNRs without memorizing them, and that it can be used to train models for real business applications.