Listing Lifetime Value (LTV) Prediction

Let me walk you through how I'd design a listing LTV prediction system for a vacation rental marketplace at scale. I'll go stage by stage — defining what we're actually predicting, business and ML objectives, high-level design, data and feature strategy, embeddings, pipeline architecture including modeling and training details, infrastructure, evaluation, and robustness. This is one of those problems where the ML is fascinating but the framing is everything — if you define "value" or "lifetime" wrong, even a perfect model will give you useless predictions. And the stakes are high because LTV predictions directly drive how much the company spends on host acquisition, where it invests in market growth, and which listings get proactive support.