Beyond Relevance Ranking: A General Graph Matching Framework for Utility-Oriented Learning to Rank

Learning to rank from logged user feedback, such as clicks or purchases, is a central component of many real-world information systems. Different from human-annotated relevance labels, the user feedback is always noisy and biased. Many existing learning to rank methods infer the underlying relevance of query–item pairs based on different assumptions of examination, and still optimize a relevance based objective. Such methods rely heavily on the correct estimation of examination, which is often difficult to achieve in practice. In this work, we propose a general framework U-rank+ for learning to rank with logged user feedback from the perspective of graph matching. We systematically analyze the biases in user feedback, including examination bias and selection bias. Then, we take both biases into consideration for unbiased utility estimation that directly based on user feedback, instead of relevance. In order to maximize the estimated utility in an efficient manner, we design two different solvers based on Sinkhorn and LambdaLoss for U-rank+ . The former is based on a standard graph matching algorithm, and the latter is inspired by the traditional method of learning to rank. Both of the algorithms have good theoretical properties to optimize the unbiased utility objective while the latter is proved to be empirically more effective and efficient in practice. Our framework U-rank+ can deal with a general utility function and can be used in a widespread of applications including web search, recommendation, and online advertising. Semi-synthetic experiments on three benchmark learning to rank datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of U-rank+ . Furthermore, our proposed framework has been deployed on two different scenarios of a mainstream App store, where the online A/B testing shows that U-rank+ achieves an average improvement of 19.2% on click-through rate and 20.8% improvement on conversion rate in recommendation scenario, and 5.12% on platform revenue in online advertising scenario over the production baselines.

Session interest model for CTR prediction based on self-attention mechanism

Click-through rate prediction, which aims to predict the probability of the user clicking on an item, is critical to online advertising. How to capture the user evolving interests from the user behavior sequence is an important issue in CTR prediction. However, most existing models ignore the factor that the sequence is composed of sessions, and user behavior can be divided into different sessions according to the occurring time. The user behaviors are highly correlated in each session and are not relevant across sessions. We propose an effective model for CTR prediction, named Session Interest Model via Self-Attention (SISA). First, we divide the user sequential behavior into session layer. A self-attention mechanism with bias coding is used to model each session. Since different session interest may be related to each other or follow a sequential pattern, next, we utilize gated recurrent unit (GRU) to capture the interaction and evolution of user different historical session interests in session interest extractor module. Then, we use the local activation and GRU to aggregate their target ad to form the final representation of the behavior sequence in session interest interacting module. Experimental results show that the SISA model performs better than other models.

Feature distillation and accumulated selection for automated fraudulent publisher classification from user click data of online advertising

PurposeThe problem of choosing the utmost useful features from hundreds of features from time-series user click data arises in online advertising toward fraudulent publisher's classification. Selecting feature subsets is a key issue in such classification tasks. Practically, the use of filter approaches is common; however, they neglect the correlations amid features. Conversely, wrapper approaches could not be applied due to their complexities. Moreover, in particular, existing feature selection methods could not handle such data, which is one of the major causes of instability of feature selection.Design/methodology/approachTo overcome such issues, a majority voting-based hybrid feature selection method, namely feature distillation and accumulated selection (FDAS), is proposed to investigate the optimal subset of relevant features for analyzing the publisher's fraudulent conduct. FDAS works in two phases: (1) feature distillation, where significant features from standard filter and wrapper feature selection methods are obtained using majority voting; (2) accumulated selection, where we enumerated an accumulated evaluation of relevant feature subset to search for an optimal feature subset using effective machine learning (ML) models.FindingsEmpirical results prove enhanced classification performance with proposed features in average precision, recall, f1-score and AUC in publisher identification and classification.Originality/valueThe FDAS is evaluated on FDMA2012 user-click data and nine other benchmark datasets to gauge its generalizing characteristics, first, considering original features, second, with relevant feature subsets selected by feature selection (FS) methods, third, with optimal feature subset obtained by the proposed approach. ANOVA significance test is conducted to demonstrate significant differences between independent features.

HetInf: Social Influence Prediction With Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network

With the continuous enrichment of social network applications, such as TikTok, Weibo, Twitter, and others, social media have become an indispensable part of our lives. Web users can participate in their favorite events or pay attention to people they like. The “heterogeneous” influence between events and users can be effectively modeled, and users’ potential future behaviors can be predicted, so as to facilitate applications such as recommendations and online advertising. For example, a user’s favorite live streaming host (user) recommends certain products (event), can we predict whether the user will buy these products in the future? The majority of studies are based on a homogeneous graph neural network to model the influence between users. However, these studies ignore the impact of events on users in reality. For instance, when users purchase commodities through live streaming channels, in addition to the factors of the host, the commodity is also a key factor that influences the behavior of users. This study designs an influence prediction model based on a heterogeneous neural network HetInf. Specifically, we first constructed the heterogeneous social influence network according to the relationship between event nodes and user nodes, then sampled the user heterogeneous subgraph for each user, extracted the relevant node features, and finally predicted the probability of user behavior through the heterogeneous neural network model. We conducted comprehensive experiments on two large social network datasets. Furthermore, the experimental results show that HetInf is significantly superior to the previous homogeneous neural network methods.

Skepticism Toward Online Advertising

Despite the enormous spending on digital advertising, consumers are skeptical toward online advertising (STA). We integrated advertising value and stimulus-organism- response (SOR) frameworks to develop a model of STA's causes and consequences. Product knowledge and perceived ethics of online seller (ETH) were proposed as moderators. For study 1, moderated-moderated mediation technique was applied on the time-lagged data of 411 consumers. For study 2, a between-subject experiment (n = 179) compared the effects of skepticism across video and picture ads. The results indicate that ETH and product knowledge moderated the relationships between stimulus-organism and organism-response states, respectively. Moreover, consumers showed favorable attitudes toward video ads. This study made novel contributions to research on STA by filling multiple voids (a) integration of advertising value and SOR (b) infotainment and puffery as predictors (c) product knowledge and perceived ethics of online seller as moderators (d), and comparison across advertisement type (video vs. picture).

RAMIFICATION OF ONLINE ADVERTISEMENTS& HEDONIC VALUE VIA SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM ON IMPULSE BUYING FOR INDIAN STREET FOOD

This study investigated how online advertising via social media & hedonic value impact impulse buying especially for Indian street food. The current study is focused on college students to see how impulse buying takes place for Indian street food when online advertising via social media is being done. The current study is based on the sample of 460 responses from people of Gandhinagar &Ahmadabad, Gujarat. To investigate the mentioned aim data has been analyzed through a variance-based SEM approach. The result shows that there is a positive & significant impact of online advertisements on impulse buying among people for street food. The major contribution through current research is to highlight how a new market for Indian street food has emerged. It has gained popularity & position as a separate food junction at low prices with due thanks to social media. They are reaching at every corner & creating hedonic motivation among food lovers & taking them up-to-the buying level. The current study has realistic implications which show the growing value for marketing via social media. This study will help in understanding & promoting even a small food vending outlet across different geographical locations. This opens up new wings to marketing strategies in targeting new customers.