Development of an End-to-end Machine Learning System with Application to In-app Purchases
This work addresses a specific business problem for mobile gaming companies, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a common industry challenge.
The paper tackled predicting when players will make in-app purchases in mobile games to optimize offers, resulting in a deployed end-to-end machine learning system.
Machine learning (ML) systems have become vital in the mobile gaming industry. Companies like King have been using them in production to optimize various parts of the gaming experience. One important area is in-app purchases: purchases made in the game by players in order to enhance and customize their gameplay experience. In this work we describe how we developed an ML system in order to predict when a player is expected to make their next in-app purchase. These predictions are used to present offers to players. We briefly describe the problem definition, modeling approach and results and then, in considerable detail, outline the end-to-end ML system. We conclude with a reflection on challenges encountered and plans for future work.