KDSM: An uplift modeling framework based on knowledge distillation and sample matching

Abstract: Uplift modeling aims to estimate the treatment effect on individuals, widely applied in the e-commerce platform to target persuadable customers and maximize the return of marketing activities. Among the existing uplift modeling methods, tree-based methods are adept at fitting increment and generalization, while neural-network-based models excel at predicting absolute value and precision, and these advantages have not been fully explored and combined. Also, the lack of counterfactual sample pairs is the root challenge in uplift modeling. In this paper, we proposed an uplift modeling framework based on Knowledge Distillation and Sample Matching (KDSM). The teacher model is the uplift decision tree (UpliftDT), whose structure is exploited to construct counterfactual sample pairs, and the pairwise incremental prediction is treated as another objective for the student model. Under the idea of multitask learning, the student model can achieve better performance on generalization and even surpass the teacher. Extensive offline experiments validate the universality of different combinations of teachers and student models and the superiority of KDSM measured against the baselines. In online A/B testing, the cost of each incremental room night is reduced by 6.5\%.