A VNS approach for book marketing campaigns generated with quasi-bicliques probabilities

This paper focuses on Book Marketing Campaigns, where the benefit of offering each book is calculated based on a bipartite graph (biclique). A quasi Biclique problem is assessed for obtaining the probabilities of success of a given client buy a given book, considering it had received another book as free offer. The remaining optimization decision problem can be solved following the Targeted Offers Problem in Direct Marketing Campaigns. The main objective is to maximize the feedback of customers purchases, offering books to the set of customers with the highest probability of buying others ones from its biclique and, at the same time, minimizing campaign operational costs. Given the combinatorial nature of the problem and the large volume of data, which can involve real cases with up to one million customers, metaheuristics procedures have been used as an efficient way for solving it. Here, a hybrid trajectory search based algorithm, namely GGVNS, which combines the Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedures and General Variable Neighborhood Search, is used. The strategy for generating the quasi Biclique problem is described and a new instance generator for the TOPDMC is introduced. Computational results regarding the GGVNS algorithm shows it is able to find useful and profitable sets of clients.