Abstract: 

Shop Cash Offers, an ads product enabling merchants to bid for customer acquisition, incorporates personalized purchase incentives called Offers. Our objective is to construct and present offers that optimize expected revenue. In this talk, we will demonstrate how to bootstrap a ranking model with a small team and limited training data, gradually transforming it into a state-of-the-art system.

We will begin by outlining the overarching architecture of the ranking model that powers the Shop Cash Offers page. Specifically, we will delve into two key components: 1) the process of identifying the most relevant offers from the available set, and 2) learning the performance of offers while effectively balancing exploration of new offers and exploitation of the best performing ones.

Furthermore, we will explore practical considerations for implementing, optimizing, and maintaining such a system in real-world scenarios. Our discussion will encompass the implementation of a simplified version of the system, and a path to extend it. Throughout the session, we will cover essential topics like evaluating system performance offline, conducting online testing with a focus on proper instrumentation, determining, and considering factors that play a pivotal role in maximizing expected revenue. These factors include proper calibration of probability scores, and measuring tripwire metrics that can affect the long term health of the product like value provided to advertisers, content quality and diversity.

Join us to gain valuable insights learned from building the ML engine powering Shop Cash Offers, and learn how to apply them in your own data science projects within an industry setting.

Bio: 

Youcef Msaid is a seasoned professional in the field of data science, currently serving as a Senior Data Science Manager at Shopify. Youcef holds a graduate degree in Economics, a foundation that has been instrumental in his approach to data science. With a decade of experience in the tech industry, his career spans across diverse sectors including the ad tech industry, gaming industry, and eCommerce industry, providing him with a broad perspective on the application of data science in different contexts. In the last three years,Youcef has been instrumental in the development of Shopify's flagship consumer products, Shop Pay and Shop App.