Abstract: Computer-readable media for determining whether to accept a candidate order from a content provider, or advertiser, to display a particular number of advertisements within a specified time segment are provided. Initially, the content provider may include placement criteria that, among other things, identify a leaf node at which impressions of the advertisement are expected to be rendered. Generally, the leaf node refers to a location within a topic graph that describes inventory that is permissible to allocate to satisfy the candidate order. To perform the determination, the inventory of impressions available for accommodating the candidate order and a log of booked orders scheduled to be placed within the time segment are identified. Linear programs are then utilized to determine whether the estimated inventory that satisfies the placement criteria is available by predictively placing the booked orders at the estimated inventory. If estimated inventory remains available, the candidate order is accepted.

Abstract: Computer-readable media for determining whether to accept a candidate order from a content provider, or advertiser, to display a particular number of advertisements within a specified time segment are provided. Initially, the content provider may include placement criteria that, among other things, identify a leaf node at which impressions of the advertisement are expected to be rendered. Generally, the leaf node refers to a location within a topic graph that describes inventory that is permissible to allocate to satisfy the candidate order. To perform the determination, the inventory of impressions available for accommodating the candidate order and a log of booked orders scheduled to be placed within the time segment are identified. Linear programs are then utilized to determine whether the estimated inventory that satisfies the placement criteria is available by predictively placing the booked orders at the estimated inventory. If estimated inventory remains available, the candidate order is accepted.

Abstract: Data slices of historical time series are leveraged to facilitate in more accurately predicting like data slices of future time series. Different predictive models are employed to detect outliers in different data slices to enhance the accuracy of the predictions. The data slices can be temporal and/or non-temporal attributes of a data set represented by the historical time series. In this manner, for example, a historical time series for a network location can be sliced temporally into one hour time periods as a function of a day, a week, a month, a year, etc. Outliers detected in these data slices can then be mitigated utilizing the predictive time series model by replacing the outlier with the expected value. The mitigated historical time series can then be employed in a predictive model to predict future web traffic for the network location (and advertising revenue values) with a substantial increase in accuracy.

Abstract: Random samples without replacement are extracted from a distributed set of items by leveraging techniques for aggregating sampled subsets of the distributed set. This provides a uniform random sample without replacement representative of the distributed set, allowing statistical information to be gleaned from extremely large sets of distributed information. Subset random samples without replacement are extracted from independent subsets of the distributed set of items. The subset random samples are then aggregated to provide a uniform random sample without replacement of a fixed size that is representative of a distributed set of items of unknown size. In one instance, a multivariate hyper-geometric distribution is sampled by breaking up the multivariate hyper-geometric distribution into a set of univariate hyper-geometric distributions.

Abstract: A system and method for estimating available payload inventory are provided. An advertisement delivery system generates a set of atomic market segment arrays from target market criteria for one or more advertisement campaigns to be served. The advertisement delivery system predicts future capacity and manages inventory utilizing forecasting methods and the manual adjustment of forecast values. The manual adjustment techniques include utilizing seed values, adjustment factors and/or proxy values.