Forecasting Granular Audience Size for Online Advertising

Orchestration of campaigns for online display advertising requires marketers to forecast audience size at the granularity of specific attributes of web traffic, characterized by the categorical nature of all attributes (e.g. {US, Chrome, Mobile}). With each attribute taking many values, the very large attribute combination set makes estimating audience size for any specific attribute combination challenging. We modify Eclat, a frequent itemset mining (FIM) algorithm, to accommodate categorical variables. For consequent frequent and infrequent itemsets, we then provide forecasts using time series analysis with conditional probabilities to aid approximation. An extensive simulation, based on typical characteristics of audience data, is built to stress test our modified-FIM approach. In two real datasets, comparison with baselines including neural network models, shows that our method lowers computation time of FIM for categorical data. On hold out samples we show that the proposed forecasting method outperforms these baselines.

Show and Recall: Learning What Makes Videos Memorable

With the explosion of video content on the Internet, there is a need for research on methods for video analysis which take human cognition into account. One such cognitive measure is memorability, or the ability to recall visual content after watching it. Prior research has looked into image memorability and shown that it is intrinsic to visual content, but the problem of modeling video memorability has not been addressed sufficiently. In this work, we develop a prediction model for video memorability, including complexities of video content in it. Detailed feature analysis reveals that the proposed method correlates well with existing findings on memorability. We also describe a novel experiment of predicting video sub-shot memorability and show that our approach improves over current memorability methods in this task. Experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that the proposed metric can achieve results on par or better than the state-of-the art methods for video summarization.