17 Sep 2003
To Buy or Not to Buy: Mining Airfare Data to Minimize
Ticket Purchase Price
Speaker: Edmond WU
Abstract
As product prices become increasingly available on the World Wide Web,
consumers attempt to understand how corporations vary these prices over
time. However, corporations change prices based on proprietary algorithms
and hidden variables (e.g., the number of unsold seats on a flight). Is it
possible to develop data mining techniques that will enable consumers to
predict price changes under these conditions?
The authors of this paper report on a pilot study in the domain of
airline ticket prices where the authors recorded over 12,000 price
observations over a 41 day period. When trained on this data, Hamlet--the
multi-strategy data mining algorithm which the authors propose, generated
a predictive model that saved 341 simulated passengers $198,074 by
advising them when to buy and when to postpone ticket purchases.
Remarkably, a clairvoyant algorithm with complete knowledge of future
prices could save at most $320,572 in the simulation, thus Hamlet's
savings were 61.8% of optimal. The algorithm's savings of $198,074
represents an average savings of 23.8% for the 341 passengers for whom
savings are possible. Overall, Hamlet saved 4.4% of the ticket price
averaged over the entire set of 4,488 simulated passengers. The pilot
study suggests that mining of price data available over the web has the
potential to save consumers substantial sums of money per annum.
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