On the Practice of Deep Hierarchical Ensemble Network for Ad Conversion Rate Prediction

The predictions of click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR) play a crucial role in the success of ad-recommendation systems. A Deep Hierarchical Ensemble Network (DHEN) has been proposed to integrate multiple feature crossing modules and has achieved great success in CTR prediction. However, its performance for CVR prediction is unclear in the conversion ads setting, where an ad bids for the probability of a user's off-site actions on a third party website or app, including purchase, add to cart, sign up, etc. A few challenges in DHEN: 1) What feature-crossing modules (MLP, DCN, Transformer, to name a few) should be included in DHEN? 2) How deep and wide should DHEN be to achieve the best trade-off between efficiency and efficacy? 3) What hyper-parameters to choose in each feature-crossing module? Orthogonal to the model architecture, the input personalization features also significantly impact model performance with a high degree of freedom. In this paper, we attack this problem and present our contributions biased to the applied data science side, including: First, we propose a multitask learning framework with DHEN as the single backbone model architecture to predict all CVR tasks, with a detailed study on how to make DHEN work effectively in practice; Second, we build both on-site real-time user behavior sequences and off-site conversion event sequences for CVR prediction purposes, and conduct ablation study on its importance; Last but not least, we propose a self-supervised auxiliary loss to predict future actions in the input sequence, to help resolve the label sparseness issue in CVR prediction. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous single feature crossing modules with pre-trained user personalization features.

Detection and Attention: Diagnosing Pulmonary Lung Cancer from CT by Imitating Physicians

This paper proposes a novel and efficient method to build a Computer-Aided Diagnoses (CAD) system for lung nodule detection based on Computed Tomography (CT). This task was treated as an Object Detection on Video (VID) problem by imitating how a radiologist reads CT scans. A lung nodule detector was trained to automatically learn nodule features from still images to detect lung nodule candidates with both high recall and accuracy. Unlike previous work which used 3-dimensional information around the nodule to reduce false positives, we propose two simple but efficient methods, Multi-slice propagation (MSP) and Motionless-guide suppression (MLGS), which analyze sequence information of CT scans to reduce false negatives and suppress false positives. We evaluated our method in open-source LUNA16 dataset which contains 888 CT scans, and obtained state-of-the-art result (Free-Response Receiver Operating Characteristic score of 0.892) with detection speed (end to end within 20 seconds per patient on a single NVidia GTX 1080) much higher than existing methods.