Deep User Segment Interest Network Modeling for Click-Through Rate Prediction of Online Advertising

Online advertising is becoming an important direction in the advertising industry with its strengths in diverse users, strong interactions, real-time feedback, and expandability. Online advertisement (Ads) can show great marketing ability by processing data from multiple channels to convey information, understanding what users want, and approaching them easily. Moreover, predicting the click-through rate (CTR) can increase advertisement revenue and user satisfaction. However, advertising data contains many features, and the amount is growing rapidly. This can be alleviated through the segmentation of users with similar interests. We assumed that the change of interest of a user could be predicted by other users' change of interest. More specifically, similar users will change their interest in a similar direction. On the basis of this idea, we proposed a novel model, the Deep User Segment Interest Network, to improve CTR prediction. We suggested three novel layers for improving performance: i) an individual interest extractor, ii) a segment interest extractor, and iii) a segment interest activation. These layers captures the latent interest of each user and creates the expressive interest representation of the segment by aggregating each user's interest. We conducted experiments using TaoBao data, which are a kind of real commercial data from an advertising platform, to confirm the CTR prediction improvement by reflecting the segment interest. The proposed algorithm obtained an AUC gain of 0.0029 with a behavior sequence length of 100. This performance exhibited the greatest improvement over other baselines, indicating the proposed method's potential contribution to business improvement.