Don’t Need All Eggs in One Basket: Reconstructing Composite Embeddings of Customers from Individual-Domain Embeddings

Abstract

Although building a 360-degree comprehensive view of a customer has been a long-standing goal in marketing, this challenge has not been successfully addressed in many marketing applications because fractured customer data stored across different “silos” are hard to integrate under “one roof” for several reasons. Instead of integrating customer data, in this article we propose to integrate several domain-specific partial customer views into one consolidated or composite customer profile using a Deep Learning-based method that is theoretically grounded in Kolmogorov’s Mapping Neural Network Existence Theorem. Furthermore, our method needs to securely access domain-specific or siloed customer data only once for building the initial customer embeddings. We conduct extensive studies on two industrial applications to demonstrate that our method effectively reconstructs stable composite customer embeddings that constitute strong approximations of the ground-truth composite embeddings obtained from integrating the siloed raw customer data. Moreover, we show that these data-security preserving reconstructed composite embeddings not only perform as well as the original ground-truth embeddings but significantly outperform partial embeddings and state-of-the-art baselines in recommendation and consumer preference prediction tasks.