Explore or Exploit? Trivago's ML for New Recommendations

The never-ending question: do you continue to "exploit" something that's already working or "explore" the vast unknown in search for something better? The multi-armed bandit being a slot machine (ie the "one-armed bandit") and the challenge lies in finding out how to choose the most profitable outcome through a series of choices. Online travel site Trivago built a machine learning algorithm to address the explore-exploit dilemma in its accommodation ranking model. Trivago Data Scientist Aida Orujova wrote a blog post explaining why. Trivago already has a list of top-performing accommodations within a vast inventory of accommodations.