Post-doc position: A/B testing guided clustering

Amadeus ( https://amadeus.com/en ) and the Zenith team of Inria ( https://team.inria.fr/zenith/ ) are seeking a postdoctoral fellow in A/B testing, clustering and time series analytics.

Title: A/B testing guided clustering

Description:

The post-doc position takes place in a new partnership between Amadeus and Inria. It is linked to Amadeus’ developments in implementation of intelligent and evolving flight recommendation search means for online travel agencies (OTAs). The general principle is to choose recommendations by optimizing several criteria simultaneously (price, duration of the trip, number of stops, etc.). Each flight recommendation is associated with a score defined as a linear combination of criteria and weight. Weights therefore define how important each criterion is. To be able to adapt the importance of the criteria according to the profile of the user, user queries are segmented by means of unsupervised classification (or clustering). Weight values are optimized independently on each segment by maximizing the estimated reservation probability of returned flight recommendations. Thus, a set of weights is associated with each of the user profiles, called segments. During the weight creation process, large volumes of data are used, especially during the segmentation phase. The ability of the flight recommendation search system to increase the conversion rate is evaluated using A / B test campaigns.

The expected work in this postdoc position is comprised of two complementary topics:
1. optimizing the planning of A / B test campaigns,
2. developing incremental methods of adaptation of flight search segmentation from the results of A / B tests.

The objective of the first point is to improve the use of A / B tests in order to draw conclusions as quickly and as safely as possible, as well as to be able to know at each stage the uncertainty about the results of the A / B test.

The second topic is directly related to the first, since it is a question of using the results of A / B test obtained on each segment to improve the segmentation. The initial idea is to develop an incremental clustering algorithm in which phases of search segmentation and A / B test follow one another.

About Amadeus
Amadeus builds the critical solutions that help airlines and airports, hotels and railways, search engines, travel agencies, tour operators and other travel players to run their operations and improve the travel experience, billions of times a year, all over the world.

About Zenith
The Zenith project-team, headed by Patrick Valduriez, aims to propose new solutions related to scientific data and activities. Our research topics incorporate the management and analysis of massive and complex data, such as uncertain data, in highly distributed environments.

Skills and profile:

– Background in data mining / data analytics
– A Ph.D. in computer science or mathematics

Environment, salary, duration:

The postdoc will be supervised by Amadeus and Inria, while being located in the Amadeus facilities of Sophia Antipolis.

Net salary: up to 3300 Euros net/month depending on your experience.
Duration: 1 Year
Starting date: flexible but ideally as soon as possible.

Contact:

Nicolas Maillot ( nicolas.maillot@amadeus.com )
Florent Masseglia ( florent.masseglia@inria.fr )

 

Permanent link to this article: https://team.inria.fr/zenith/post-doc-position-a-b-testing-guided-clustering/