An Attention-based Model for Conversion Rate Prediction with Delayed Feedback via Post-click Calibration

Abstract

Conversion rate (CVR) prediction is becoming increasingly important in the multi-billion dollar online display advertising industry. It has two major challenges: firstly, the scarce user history data is very complicated and non-linear; secondly, the time delay between the clicks and the corresponding conversions can be very large, e.g., ranging from seconds to weeks. Existing models usually suffer from such scarce and delayed conversion behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework to tackle the two challenges. Specifically, we extract the pre-trained embedding from impressions/clicks to assist in conversion models and propose an inner/self-attention mechanism to capture the fine-grained personalized product purchase interests from the sequential click data. Besides, to overcome the time-delay issue, we calibrate the delay model by learning dynamic hazard function with the abundant post-click data more in line with the real distribution. Empirical experiments with real-world user behavior data prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.