Technical Reports

HPL-2013-11

Wang, Jianqiang (Jay); Hastie, Trevor
HP Laboratories

HPL-2013-11

Keyword(s): Boosting; gradient descent; tree-based regression; varying-coefficient model

Abstract: Estimating the aggregated market demand for a product in a dynamic market is critical to manufacturers and retailers. Motivated by the need for a statistical demand prediction model for laptop pricing at Hewlett- Packard, we have developed a novel boosting-based varying-coefficient regression model. The developed model uses regression trees as the base learner, and is generally applicable to varying-coefficient models with a large number of mixed-type varying-coefficient variables, which proves to be challenging for conventional nonparametric smoothing methods. The proposed method works well in both predicting the response and estimating the coefficient surface, based on a simulation study. Finally, we have applied this methodology to real-world mobile computer sales data, and demonstrated its superiority by comparing with elastic net and kernel regression based varying- coefficient model.

33 Pages

External Posting Date: February 21, 2013 [Abstract Only]. Approved for External Publication - External Copyright Consideration
Internal Posting Date: February 21, 2013 [Fulltext]

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