An Opportunistic Bandit Approach for User Interface Experimentation
This addresses the high opportunity costs of experimentation for online retailers seeking to optimize user experience, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing bandit method to a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of costly user interface experimentation in online retail by modeling it as an opportunistic bandit problem, achieving significant regret reduction through mitigation of expensive exploration and use of contextual information.
Facing growing competition from online rivals, the retail industry is increasingly investing in their online shopping platforms to win the high-stake battle of customer' loyalty. User experience is playing an essential role in this competition, and retailers are continuously experimenting and optimizing their user interface for better user experience. The cost of experimentation is dominated by the opportunity cost of providing a suboptimal service to the customers. Through this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of opportunistic bandits to make the experiments as inexpensive as possible using real online retail data. In fact, we model user interface experimentation as an opportunistic bandit problem, in which the cost of exploration varies under a factor extracted from customer features. We achieve significant regret reduction by mitigating costly exploration and providing extra contextual information that helps to guide the testing process. Moreover, we analyze the advantages and challenges of using opportunistic bandits for online retail experimentation.