Prospective Modeling of Users for Online Display Advertising via Deep Time-Aware Model

Prospective display advertising poses a particular challenge for large advertising platforms. The existing machine learning algorithms are easily biased towards the highly predictable retargeting events that are often non-eligible for the prospective campaigns, thus exhibiting a decline in advertising performance. To that end, efforts are made to design powerful models that can learn from signals of various strength and temporal impact collected about each user from different data sources and provide a good quality and early estimation of users' conversion rates. In this study, we propose a novel deep time-aware approach designed to model sequences of users' activities and capture implicit temporal signals of users' conversion intents. On several real-world datasets, we show that the proposed approach consistently outperforms other, previously proposed approaches by a significant margin while providing interpretability of signal impact to conversion probability.