While working with data and analyzing the interactions of our users with the products we have today, it is essential to understand their behaviors by tracking their past actions, such as opening notifications, interacting with a blog, or creating a new login in the platform. In that context, the attribution study refers to the method of grouping together all of those actions in a specific pattern to generate one desired end result.

Imagine, out of thousands of accommodations that match a user search, you have to select the “best” 25 to show to the user. Which ones would you show- the ones you know perform well or ones that have never been shown before, so that you can discover new high-potential accommodations? In the Data Science world, this is known as exploitation (continue doing what works well) versus exploration (try something new to discover hidden potential) problem and is often explained using the well-known multi-armed bandit problem. The objective of the problem is to divide a fixed number of resources between competing choices to maximize their expected gains, given that the properties of each choice are not fully known at the time of allocation.

In the last few years, organisations have been increasing their investments in building Machine Learning (ML) based systems. In practice, such systems often took longer than expected to be built or failed to deliver the promised outcome. Data availability and quality have been among the most significant reasons behind this phenomenon. Since each organisation had its custom problems, open datasets or even logged data were not always directly usable. As a result, data collection and annotation processes became more crucial, yet remained under-documented.