Using Reinforcement Learning to Solve Business Problems

Author(s): Shenggang Li

Originally published on Towards AI.

Exploring RL Concepts and Applications Through a Customer Engagement Example

As a data scientist in any industry, if you’ve spent your career building supervised learning models — predicting customer churn, segmenting users, or forecasting sales — you know how powerful data-driven decisions can be. But what if you want to go beyond “one-shot” predictions and actually learn how to optimize multi-step processes, like guiding a user from the first click all the way to conversion? For example, you could use reinforcement learning to learn from historical recommendation system data to calibrate your strategies, guide future customer lifecycles, and find the optimal path to maximize long-term engagement and retention. That’s where reinforcement learning (RL) comes in.

This article delves into the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in business contexts, particularly emphasizing customer engagement and conversion optimization. It explores key RL concepts such as states, actions, policies, and value functions, explaining how these can be employed to enhance customer interactions. The piece contrasts RL with traditional supervised learning, highlighting its potential for modeling sequential decisions over time by providing strategies that maximize long-term customer value. Through practical examples and methods like Monte Carlo simulations and temporal difference learning, the author illustrates how RL can be leveraged to derive actionable insights for improving customer engagement and conversion rates, making it a vital tool for modern data-driven marketing strategies.

Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI