Research scientists try to build universal customer models and applications, motivated by the recent success of pre-trained models in the language and vision fields.

Such models can be adapted to improve a diverse set of service solutions including recommendation systems, customer targeting solutions, and credit scoring functions, to name a few. For initial and simpler applications, we predict customer attributes with CustomerDNA.

Credit Scoring is a crucial research topic across the Rakuten group, specifically in our fintech businesses including credit card, payment, securities, and banking businesses. Research scientists apply machine learning, data mining, and optimization techniques to solve challenging problems, and build models and solutions regarding credit scoring-related projects. Our solutions include scoring for both business clients and individual users.

Rakuten group is contacting our customers with various kinds of communication channels, such as showing banners on web pages, sending email, pushing notification through apps, to promote our products and services. In order to deliver the right content at the right time to the right customers, research scientists apply reinforcement learning algoirthms to build models to content delivery platforms.

Customer DNA (CDNA) is a platform to manage Rakuten customer profiles by utilizing data from different Rakuten businesses. CDNA-IAs, a part of CDNA, are predicted customer profiles using machine learning profiles. The team builds and operates many models for CDNA-IAs. The team does apply recent research progress to develop efficient data pipeline and model creation.

Identifying social relationships between Rakuten members, such as family and friends, enables us to improve performance of the marketing measures. Under this assumption, research scientists build a social graph structure among Rakuten members and their relatives by collecting data from multiple Rakuten services, and apply graph algorithms including graph neural networks to conduct marketing measures, such as a family introduction campaign.

With more than 70 different services in the Rakuten Group globally, our data science teams cover diverse initiatives in both the online and offline worlds. Offline Geo data and Geo Science applications are key to the optimization and overall success in fields including Logistics, Site Planning, Area Marketing and improving Customer Experience. The Geo Science Team creates algorithms and builds new Geo Intelligence layers to better understand offline activity to support many Rakuten Group services.