ROSE: Retail outlet site evaluation by learning with both sample and feature preference

Abstract

It is critical for retail enterprises to select good sites or locations to open their stores, especially in current competitive retail market. However, evaluating the goodness of sites in real business applications is a complex problem. That is, how to judge whether the market around a store site is good? We don't know the exact mechanism of how a site can be good and it is hard to have correct site goodness values as supervised labels. The Retail Outlet Site Evaluation (ROSE) tool is designed to learn the site evaluation model by integrating city geographic & demographic data and two kinds of expert knowledge: sample preference and feature preference. The feature preference information can help greatly reduce the required number of sample preferences. It enables our application practicable because it is almost impossible to give such amount of sample preference pairs manually by experts when ranking hundreds of data points. In the experiment and case study part, we show that the ROSE tool can achieve good results and useful for users to do site evaluation work in real cases. Copyright 2009 ACM.