Machine Learning for Coding Retail Product Names

Machine Learning for Coding Retail Product Names to Consumer-Price Categories: A Rule-plus-Bag-of-Words Pipeline with Reliability-Weighted Human-in-the-Loop Labeling

Announce Type: new Abstract: Consumer-price measurement increasingly draws on alternative data sources -- scanner, web-scraped, and transaction/receipt data. A recurring obstacle is that product descriptions in such sources are short, noisy, and abbreviated, with no standard product code, so each item must first be mapped to a consumption classification (e.g., the UN COICOP scheme) before prices can be compared. This paper studies that mapping as a general, reproducible method.