"Optimal Large-Scale Internet Media Selection" (Also Next Week at the Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Only of interest if you (1) wish you could use the power of modern optimization to allocate an online advertising budget, and (2) will be in Pittsburgh on Tuesday.

I can think of at least two ways an Internet Thought Leader could make a splash by combining Tuesday's seminar with Maciej Ceglowski's "The Advertising Bubble". Fortunately for all concerned, I am not an Internet Thought Leader.

Courtney Paulson, "Optimal Large-Scale Internet Media Selection" [PDF preprint]

Abstract: Although Internet advertising is vital in today's business world, research on optimal Internet media selection has been sparse. Firms face considerable challenges in their budget allocation decisions, including the large number of websites they may potentially choose, the vast variation in traffic and costs across websites, and the inevitable correlations in viewership among these sites. Due to these unique features, Internet advertising problems are actually a subset of a more diverse, general class of problems: penalized and constrained optimization. Generally, attempting to select the optimal subset of websites among all possible combinations is a NP-hard problem; as such, existing non-approaches can only handle Internet media selection in settings on the order of ten websites. Further, these approaches are not generalizable. Although generalizable penalized methodology exists to handle large-scale problems, this methodology cannot incorporate natural advertising constraints, such as budget allocation to particular websites or demographic weighting. We propose an optimization method that is computationally feasible to allocate advertising budgets among thousands of websites while also incorporating these common constraints. The method performs similarly to extant approaches in settings scalable to prior methods, but the method is also flexible enough to accommodate practical Internet advertising considerations such as targeted consumer demographics, mandatory media coverage to matched content websites, and target frequency of ad exposure.

Time and place: 4:30--5:30 pm on Tuesday, 16 February 2016, in Baker Hall A51

Due to winter travel delays, the talk with take place at 4:30 on Wednesday the 17th, room TBA

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Enigmas of Chance