Personalized next-best action recommendation with multi-party interaction learning for automated decision-making

Abstract

Automated next-best action recommendation for each customer in a sequential, dynamic and interactive context has been widely needed in natural, social and business decisionmaking. Personalized next-best action recommendation must involve past, current and future customer demographics and circumstances (states) and behaviors, long-range sequential interactions between customers and decision-makers, multi-sequence interactions between states, behaviors and actions, and their reactions to their counterpart's actions. No existing modeling theories and tools, including Markovian decision processes, user and behavior modeling, deep sequential modeling, and personalized sequential recommendation, can quantify such complex decision-making on a personal level. We take a data-driven approach to learn the next-best actions for personalized decision-making by a reinforced coupled recurrent neural network (CRN). CRN represents multiple coupled dynamic sequences of a customer's historical and current states, responses to decisionmakers' actions, decision rewards to actions, and learns long-term multi-sequence interactions between parties (customer and decision-maker). Next-best actions are then recommended on each customer at a time point to change their state for an optimal decisionmaking objective. Our study demonstrates the potential of personalized deep learning of multi-sequence interactions and automated dynamic intervention for personalized decisionmaking in complex systems.