arXiv:2602.11505cs.LG2026-02

用不准确的外部预测修正无法观测的消费者弃购行为,提升销售决策效果。

Calibrating an Imperfect Auxiliary Predictor for Unobserved No-Purchase Choice

  • 通过回归校准偏差预测,在仅知购买数据下还原弃购概率。
  • 提出基于排序的校准方法,给出有限样本误差边界。
  • 适用于只有交易数据、缺乏用户弃购信息的商业场景。

企业通常无法观测消费者关键行为:是否选择竞品、放弃购买,或根本未考虑自身产品。缺失的外部选项信息使市场容量与偏好估计困难,尤其在仅记录交易数据的场景下。现有方法多依赖辅助市场占有率、聚合或跨市场数据。本文研究一种互补设定:黑箱辅助预测器提供外部选项概率,但可能因训练环境、时间或人群不同而存在偏差。我们提出校准方法,仅用目标环境的购买数据,将不准确的预测转化为统计有效的弃购估计。首先,在对数几率空间中仿射偏差下,简单回归可识别外部选项效用参数,并一致恢复弃购概率,无需收集弃购标签。其次,在较弱的近单调条件下,提出基于排序的校准方法,推导出有限样本误差界,清晰分离辅助预测质量与第一阶段可观测选择的效用学习误差。分析还将估计误差映射为组合优化的下游决策质量,量化校准精度对收益的影响。边界明确体现预测对齐度与效用学习误差的依赖关系,揭示两者主导情形。数值实验验证了弃购估计与下游组合决策的改进,并讨论多个辅助预测器的鲁棒聚合扩展。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Firms typically cannot observe key consumer actions: whether customers buy from a competitor, choose not to buy, or even fully consider the firm's offer. This missing outside-option information makes market-size and preference estimation difficult even in simple multinomial logit (MNL) models, and it is a central obstacle in practice when only transaction data are recorded. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary market-share, aggregated, or cross-market data. We study a complementary setting in which a black-box auxiliary predictor provides outside-option probabilities, but is potentially biased or miscalibrated because it was trained in a different channel, period, or population, or produced by an external machine-learning system. We develop calibration methods that turn such imperfect predictions into statistically valid no-purchase estimates using purchase-only data from the focal environment. First, under affine miscalibration in logit space, we show that a simple regression identifies outside-option utility parameters and yields consistent recovery of no-purchase probabilities without collecting new labels for no-purchase events. Second, under a weaker nearly monotone condition, we propose a rank-based calibration method and derive finite-sample error bounds that cleanly separate auxiliary-predictor quality from first-stage utility-learning error over observed in-set choices. Our analysis also translates estimation error into downstream decision quality for assortment optimization, quantifying how calibration accuracy affects revenue performance. The bounds provide explicit dependence on predictor alignment and utility-learning error, clarifying when each source dominates. Numerical experiments demonstrate improvements in no-purchase estimation and downstream assortment decisions, and we discuss robust aggregation extensions for combining multiple auxiliary predictors.

消费者行为偏好估计校准方法决策优化

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