Deep Pattern Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks play a pivotal role in real-world applications, particularly in recommendation systems and online advertising. A significant research branch in this domain focuses on user behavior modeling. Current research predominantly centers on modeling co-occurrence relationships between the target item and items previously interacted with by users in their historical data. However, this focus neglects the intricate modeling of user behavior patterns. In reality, the abundance of user interaction records encompasses diverse behavior patterns, indicative of a spectrum of habitual paradigms. These patterns harbor substantial potential to significantly enhance CTR prediction performance. To harness the informational potential within user behavior patterns, we extend Target Attention (TA) to Target Pattern Attention (TPA) to model pattern-level dependencies. Furthermore, three critical challenges demand attention: the inclusion of unrelated items within behavior patterns, data sparsity in behavior patterns, and computational complexity arising from numerous patterns. To address these challenges, we introduce the Deep Pattern Network (DPN), designed to comprehensively leverage information from user behavior patterns. DPN efficiently retrieves target-related user behavior patterns using a target-aware attention mechanism. Additionally, it contributes to refining user behavior patterns through a pre-training paradigm based on self-supervised learning while promoting dependency learning within sparse patterns. Our comprehensive experiments, conducted across three public datasets, substantiate the superior performance and broad compatibility of DPN.