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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02004v1
• Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:59:29 GMT
• Title: 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
• Abstract summary: This paper studies that mapping as a general, reproducible method.<n>We use a human-in-the-loop protocol in which annotators give a binary valid/reject judgment.<n>A Monte-Carlo study of the labeling protocol shows the reliability-weighted vote barely beats plain majority.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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. The pipeline is: (i) text normalization and tokenization of noisy item names; (ii) a prefix-tree (trie) rule-based pre-classifier driven by per-category key-phrases and stop-phrases; and (iii) a per-category binary confirmation model deciding whether an item belongs to a tentatively assigned category. For labels at scale we use a human-in-the-loop protocol in which annotators give a binary valid/reject judgment, aggregated by a dynamically updated reliability weight; the model joins the same rule, enabling continual fine-tuning. Our empirical finding is deflationary: in a controlled, leakage-free study (one category, real positives vs. hard negatives, five seeds), bag-of-words models essentially saturate the task (F1 about 0.99) -- a linear classifier matches a multilayer perceptron, explicit word-order (n-gram) features add nothing, and about 67 labeled examples already suffice. A Monte-Carlo study of the labeling protocol shows the reliability-weighted vote barely beats plain majority (its additive weights saturate) while Dawid-Skene recovers labels markedly better. We also discuss price-level quality control and design lessons for statistical offices considering transaction data. All figures are illustrative; no confidential data, code, or documentation is reproduced.

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