Probabilistic machine learning: New frontiers for modeling consumers and their choices

Making sense of massive, individual-level data is challenging: marketing researchers and analysts need flexible models that can accommodate rich patterns of heterogeneity and dynamics, work with and link diverse data types, and scale to modern data sizes. Practitioners also need tools that can quantify uncertainty in models and predictions of consumer behavior to inform optimal decision-making. In this paper, we demonstrate the promise of probabilistic machine learning (PML), which refers to the pairing of probabilistic modeling and machine learning methods, in pushing the frontier of combining flexibility, scalability, interpretability, and uncertainty quantification for building better models of consumers and their choices. Specifically, we overview both PML models and inference methods, and highlight their utility for addressing four common classes of marketing problems: (1) uncovering heterogeneity, (2) flexibly modeling nonlinearities and dynamics, (3) handling high-dimensional and unstructured data, and (4) addressing missingness, often via data fusion. We also discuss promising directions in enriching marketing models, reflecting recent developments in representation learning, causal inference, experimentation and decision-making, and theory-based behavioral modeling.