Smart Advertisement for Maximal Clicks in Online Social Networks Without User Data

Smart cities are a growing paradigm in the design of systems that interact with one another for informed and efficient decision making, empowered by data and technology, of resources in a city. The diffusion of information to citizens in a smart city will rely on social trends and smart advertisement. Online social networks (OSNs) are prominent and increasingly important platforms to spread information, observe social trends, and advertise new products. To maximize the benefits of such platforms in sharing information, many groups invest in finding ways to maximize the expected number of clicks as a proxy of these platform's performance. As such, the study of click-through rate (CTR) prediction of advertisements, in environments like online social media, is of much interest. Prior works build machine learning (ML) using user-specific data to classify whether a user will click on an advertisement or not. For our work, we consider a large set of Facebook advertisement data (with no user data) and categorize targeted interests into thematic groups we call conceptual nodes. ML models are trained using the advertisement data to perform CTR prediction with conceptual node combinations. We then cast the problem of finding the optimal combination of conceptual nodes as an optimization problem. Given a certain budget
$k$
, we are interested in finding the optimal combination of conceptual nodes that maximize the CTR. We discuss the hardness and possible NP-hardness of the optimization problem. Then, we propose a greedy algorithm and a genetic algorithm to find near-optimal combinations of conceptual nodes in polynomial time, with the genetic algorithm nearly matching the optimal solution. We observe that simple ML models can exhibit the high Pearson correlation coefficients w.r.t. click predictions and real click values. Additionally, we find that the conceptual nodes of “politics”, “celebrity”, and “organization” are notably more influential than other considered conceptual nodes.