Causality-based CTR Prediction using Graph Neural Networks

As a prevalent problem in online advertising, CTR prediction has attracted plentiful attention from both academia and industry. Recent studies have been reported to establish CTR prediction models in the graph neural networks (GNNs) framework. However, most of GNNs-based models handle feature interactions in a complete graph, while ignoring causal relationships among features, which results in a huge drop in the performance on out-of-distribution data. This paper is dedicated to developing a causality-based CTR prediction model in the GNNs framework (Causal-GNN) integrating representations of feature graph, user graph and ad graph in the context of online advertising. In our model, a structured representation learning method (GraphFwFM) is designed to capture high-order representations on feature graph based on causal discovery among field features in gated graph neural networks (GGNNs), and GraphSAGE is employed to obtain graph representations of users and ads. Experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate the superiority of Causal-GNN in AUC and Logloss and the effectiveness of GraphFwFM in capturing high-order representations on causal feature graph.

Click-Through Rate Prediction in Online Advertising: A Literature Review

Predicting the probability that a user will click on a specific advertisement has been a prevalent issue in online advertising, attracting much research attention in the past decades. As a hot research frontier driven by industrial needs, recent years have witnessed more and more novel learning models employed to improve advertising CTR prediction. Although extant research provides necessary details on algorithmic design for addressing a variety of specific problems in advertising CTR prediction, the methodological evolution and connections between modeling frameworks are precluded. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are few comprehensive surveys on this topic. We make a systematic literature review on state-of-the-art and latest CTR prediction research, with a special focus on modeling frameworks. Specifically, we give a classification of state-of-the-art CTR prediction models in the extant literature, within which basic modeling frameworks and their extensions, advantages and disadvantages, and performance assessment for CTR prediction are presented. Moreover, we summarize CTR prediction models with respect to the complexity and the order of feature interactions, and performance comparisons on various datasets. Furthermore, we identify current research trends, main challenges and potential future directions worthy of further explorations. This review is expected to provide fundamental knowledge and efficient entry points for IS and marketing scholars who want to engage in this area.