Title
Personalized Advertisement Recommendation: A Ranking Approach to Address the Ubiquitous Click Sparsity Problem.
Abstract
We study the problem of personalized advertisement recommendation (PAR), which consist of a user visiting a system (website) and the system displaying one of $K$ ads to the user. The system uses an internal ad recommendation policy to map the useru0027s profile (context) to one of the ads. The user either clicks or ignores the ad and correspondingly, the system updates its recommendation policy. PAR problem is usually tackled by scalable emph{contextual bandit} algorithms, where the policies are generally based on classifiers. A practical problem in PAR is extreme click sparsity, due to very few users actually clicking on ads. We systematically study the drawback of using contextual bandit algorithms based on classifier-based policies, in face of extreme click sparsity. We then suggest an alternate policy, based on rankers, learnt by optimizing the Area Under the Curve (AUC) ranking loss, which can significantly alleviate the problem of click sparsity. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets, as well as three industry proprietary datasets, to illustrate the improvement in click-through-rate (CTR) obtained by using the ranker-based policy over classifier-based policies.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
arXiv: Learning
Drawback,Ranking,Advertising,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Classifier (linguistics),Machine learning,Scalability
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1603.01870
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sougata Chaudhuri1114.27
Georgios Theocharous214016.65
Mohammad Ghavamzadeh381467.73