Constrained user-item allocation for e-commerce marketing campaigns

2026-06-08

AI Summary

This study addresses the problem of jointly selecting items and users in e-commerce marketing campaigns to construct non-overlapping, high-quality promotion groups that maximize matching effectiveness. The task is formalized for the first time as an automatic targeting problem, and a novel combinatorial optimization framework is proposed, integrating constrained spectral co-clustering, greedy local search with pairwise exchanges, and multi-armed bandits to jointly optimize effectiveness, fairness, and scalability. Experimental results on synthetic data, Amazon Reviews, and large-scale real-world commercial datasets demonstrate that the proposed co-clustering approach achieves superior performance in campaign quality, uplift, and fairness, while the multi-armed bandit variant exhibits stronger scalability in ultra-large-scale scenarios.

Abstract

When running marketing campaigns, retailers must decide which products to promote and which users to target. These decisions are inherently coupled: effective campaigns match users and items with strong mutual affinity into non-overlapping groups of predefined sizes. However, existing approaches assume predefined campaign structure or decouple item selection from user assignment, and cannot discover campaign groupings directly from joint interaction patterns. We therefore formalize this campaign problem as auto-targeting: jointly selecting users and items to construct multiple disjoint campaigns. To solve this combinatorial problem, we propose three complementary strategies: (i) constrained spectral biclustering to find dense regions in the user-item affinity matrix, (ii) greedy local search with pairwise swaps for combinatorial refinement, and (iii) a multi-armed bandit framework to escape local optima through exploration. We evaluate these methods on a synthetic dataset, the Amazon Reviews benchmarks, and large-scale proprietary commercial data, and compare the results to simulated annealing as a baseline. The results show that biclustering consistently achieves the highest campaign quality, lift, and fairness scores. While biclustering runs efficiently on smaller datasets, its runtime increases substantially on very large ones, where bandit-based methods instead offer a scalable alternative.

Problem

• user-item allocation
• marketing campaigns
• auto-targeting
• biclustering
• combinatorial optimization

Innovation

• constrained spectral biclustering
• auto-targeting
• user-item allocation
• multi-armed bandit
• combinatorial optimization