Population-based Method for Optimizing Targeted Offers Problem in Direct Marketing Campaigns

Abstract

In direct marketing campaigns, the optimization of targeted offers problem is a big business concern. The main goal is to maximize the company’s profit by reaching the right clients. The main challenge faced by companies when advertising, is to configure properly a campaign by choosing the appropriate target, so it is guaranteed a high acceptance of users to advertisements. When dealing with an important size of data, the important specification to consider is the combinatorial aspect of the problem and the limitation of the approach based on mathematical programming methods. In this article, and since this problem belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, the use of metaheuristic, instead of exact methods, is essential; the Bat Algorithm which is a new inspired algorithm is proposed after hybridization with Genetic Algorithm. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm was able to give good and competitive solutions