ai-at-the-web-scale

Final project for "AI at the web scale" course. This project involves maximizing the cumulative reward for simulated visitors on a website by serving ads with various parameters. This is a contextual bandit problem.

##Dependencies

• Python 2.7
• numpy, pandas, sklearn, matplotlib, scipy.
• plotta-python (pip install plotta). You should run Plotta locally for live plotting of some stats.

##Directions Add a credentials.py file with two variables, TEAM_ID and PASSWORD with your team name and password for the API.

####Data retrieval and analysis

• context_get_pool.py contains a parallel generator of contexts (so that at least one is always ready), this halves the running time more or less.
• scraper.py Parallel scraper, uses random actions.
• analysis.py Ad-hoc script for exploring the scraped data.
• api.py Wrapper for the REST API.

###Model/learning

• bts.py Bootstrap Thompson Sampling implementation.
• models.py Contains all models (Random, Linear model, Thompson sampling model)
• decode.py, encode.py Used for encoding and decoding of actions and contexts from and into a feature vector.
• linmod.py Offline linear model.

###Misc

• constants.py Contains domain information of the assignment.
• run.py Entry point.