Contrastive Learning for Inventory Add Prediction at Fliggy

Online Travel Platforms (OTPs) serve as crucial bridges between hotels and users, hotel staff can synchronize room inventory information with OTPs through manual and auto modes. In the manual mode, the hotel staff must manually maintain the inventory information on the OTPs. This mode often leads to the "inventory synchronization delay'' phenomenon where OTPs show no availability while hotels still have available rooms, seriously affecting the competitiveness of OTPs and hotel sales. To address this issue, Fliggy uses inventory add prediction (IAP) to determine whether to add an inventory for the sold-out room type. However, in practice, accurate modeling of IAP faces significant challenges due to the data sparsity. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning framework for Inventory Add Prediction at Fliggy (CL4IAP), which consists of the Joint Pay-Accept Prediction Module, the Data Augmentation Module, and the Contrastive Learning Module. Specifically, the Joint Pay-Accept Prediction Module aims to predict the likelihood of generating an order and the hotel acceptance after adding an inventory. It also includes a specially designed correlation enhancement component that facilitates the expert prediction network's learning through knowledge transfer based on inter-task correlation. In the Data Augmentation Module, we design three novel data augmentation strategies for the first time based on the correlation and importance of features. In the Contrastive Learning Module, we design instance-level and cluster-level contrastive losses, which aim to minimize the distance between positive sample pairs and mitigate the negative impact of false negative sample pairs, respectively. Both offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CL4IAP, and CL4IAP has been successfully deployed on Fliggy.