Deep Landscape Forecasting for Real-time Bidding Advertising

The emergence of real-time auction in online advertising has drawn huge attention of modeling the market competition, i.e., bid landscape forecasting. The problem is formulated as to forecast the probability distribution of market price for each ad auction. With the consideration of the censorship issue which is caused by the second-price auction mechanism, many researchers have devoted their efforts on bid landscape forecasting by incorporating survival analysis from medical research field. However, most existing solutions mainly focus on either counting-based statistics of the segmented sample clusters, or learning a parameterized model based on some heuristic assumptions of distribution forms. Moreover, they neither consider the sequential patterns of the feature over the price space. In order to capture more sophisticated yet flexible patterns at fine-grained level of the data, we propose a Deep Landscape Forecasting (DLF) model which combines deep learning for probability distribution forecasting and survival analysis for censorship handling. Specifically, we utilize a recurrent neural network to flexibly model the conditional winning probability w.r.t. each bid price. Then we conduct the bid landscape forecasting through probability chain rule with strict mathematical derivations. And, in an end-to-end manner, we optimize the model by minimizing two negative likelihood losses with comprehensive motivations. Without any specific assumption for the distribution form of bid landscape, our model shows great advantages over previous works on fitting various sophisticated market price distributions. In the experiments over two large-scale real-world datasets, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions under various metrics.Comment: KDD 2019. The reproducible code and dataset link is https://github.com/rk2900/DL

Real-Time Bidding by Reinforcement Learning in Display Advertising

The majority of online display ads are served through real-time bidding (RTB) --- each ad display impression is auctioned off in real-time when it is just being generated from a user visit. To place an ad automatically and optimally, it is critical for advertisers to devise a learning algorithm to cleverly bid an ad impression in real-time. Most previous works consider the bid decision as a static optimization problem of either treating the value of each impression independently or setting a bid price to each segment of ad volume. However, the bidding for a given ad campaign would repeatedly happen during its life span before the budget runs out. As such, each bid is strategically correlated by the constrained budget and the overall effectiveness of the campaign (e.g., the rewards from generated clicks), which is only observed after the campaign has completed. Thus, it is of great interest to devise an optimal bidding strategy sequentially so that the campaign budget can be dynamically allocated across all the available impressions on the basis of both the immediate and future rewards. In this paper, we formulate the bid decision process as a reinforcement learning problem, where the state space is represented by the auction information and the campaign's real-time parameters, while an action is the bid price to set. By modeling the state transition via auction competition, we build a Markov Decision Process framework for learning the optimal bidding policy to optimize the advertising performance in the dynamic real-time bidding environment. Furthermore, the scalability problem from the large real-world auction volume and campaign budget is well handled by state value approximation using neural networks.Comment: WSDM 201

Deep Recurrent Survival Analysis

Survival analysis is a hotspot in statistical research for modeling time-to-event information with data censorship handling, which has been widely used in many applications such as clinical research, information system and other fields with survivorship bias. Many works have been proposed for survival analysis ranging from traditional statistic methods to machine learning models. However, the existing methodologies either utilize counting-based statistics on the segmented data, or have a pre-assumption on the event probability distribution w.r.t. time. Moreover, few works consider sequential patterns within the feature space. In this paper, we propose a Deep Recurrent Survival Analysis model which combines deep learning for conditional probability prediction at fine-grained level of the data, and survival analysis for tackling the censorship. By capturing the time dependency through modeling the conditional probability of the event for each sample, our method predicts the likelihood of the true event occurrence and estimates the survival rate over time, i.e., the probability of the non-occurrence of the event, for the censored data. Meanwhile, without assuming any specific form of the event probability distribution, our model shows great advantages over the previous works on fitting various sophisticated data distributions. In the experiments on the three real-world tasks from different fields, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions under various metrics.Comment: AAAI 2019. Supplemental material, slides, code: https://github.com/rk2900/drs

Bid Optimization by Multivariable Control in Display Advertising

Real-Time Bidding (RTB) is an important paradigm in display advertising, where advertisers utilize extended information and algorithms served by Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) to improve advertising performance. A common problem for DSPs is to help advertisers gain as much value as possible with budget constraints. However, advertisers would routinely add certain key performance indicator (KPI) constraints that the advertising campaign must meet due to practical reasons. In this paper, we study the common case where advertisers aim to maximize the quantity of conversions, and set cost-per-click (CPC) as a KPI constraint. We convert such a problem into a linear programming problem and leverage the primal-dual method to derive the optimal bidding strategy. To address the applicability issue, we propose a feedback control-based solution and devise the multivariable control system. The empirical study based on real-word data from Taobao.com verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach compared with the state of the art in the industry practices

Towards a User Privacy-Aware Mobile Gaming App Installation Prediction Model

Over the past decade, programmatic advertising has received a great deal of attention in the online advertising industry. A real-time bidding (RTB) system is rapidly becoming the most popular method to buy and sell online advertising impressions. Within the RTB system, demand-side platforms (DSP) aim to spend advertisers' campaign budgets efficiently while maximizing profit, seeking impressions that result in high user responses, such as clicks or installs. In the current study, we investigate the process of predicting a mobile gaming app installation from the point of view of a particular DSP, while paying attention to user privacy, and exploring the trade-off between privacy preservation and model performance. There are multiple levels of potential threats to user privacy, depending on the privacy leaks associated with the data-sharing process, such as data transformation or de-anonymization. To address these concerns, privacy-preserving techniques were proposed, such as cryptographic approaches, for training privacy-aware machine-learning models. However, the ability to train a mobile gaming app installation prediction model without using user-level data, can prevent these threats and protect the users' privacy, even though the model's ability to predict may be impaired. Additionally, current laws might force companies to declare that they are collecting data, and might even give the user the option to opt out of such data collection, which might threaten companies' business models in digital advertising, which are dependent on the collection and use of user-level data. We conclude that privacy-aware models might still preserve significant capabilities, enabling companies to make better decisions, dependent on the privacy-efficacy trade-off utility function of each case.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

Display Advertising with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Behavioural Targeting

The most significant progress in recent years in online display advertising is what is known as the Real-Time Bidding (RTB) mechanism to buy and sell ads. RTB essentially facilitates buying an individual ad impression in real time while it is still being generated from a user’s visit. RTB not only scales up the buying process by aggregating a large amount of available inventories across publishers but, most importantly, enables direct targeting of individual users. As such, RTB has fundamentally changed the landscape of digital marketing. Scientifically, the demand for automation, integration and optimisation in RTB also brings new research opportunities in information retrieval, data mining, machine learning and other related fields. In this monograph, an overview is given of the fundamental infrastructure, algorithms, and technical solutions of this new frontier of computational advertising. The covered topics include user response prediction, bid landscape forecasting, bidding algorithms, revenue optimisation, statistical arbitrage, dynamic pricing, and ad fraud detection

Display Advertising with Real-Time Bidding (RTB) and Behavioural Targeting

The most significant progress in recent years in online display advertising is what is known as the Real-Time Bidding (RTB) mechanism to buy and sell ads. RTB essentially facilitates buying an individual ad impression in real time while it is still being generated from a user’s visit. RTB not only scales up the buying process by aggregating a large amount of available inventories across publishers but, most importantly, enables direct targeting of individual users. As such, RTB has fundamentally changed the landscape of digital marketing. Scientifically, the demand for automation, integration and optimisation in RTB also brings new research opportunities in information retrieval, data mining, machine learning and other related fields. In this monograph, an overview is given of the fundamental infrastructure, algorithms, and technical solutions of this new frontier of computational advertising. The covered topics include user response prediction, bid landscape forecasting, bidding algorithms, revenue optimisation, statistical arbitrage, dynamic pricing, and ad fraud detection

Forecasting online advertising costs: interpretable deep learning of the competitive bidding landscape

As advertisers increasingly shift their budgets toward digital advertising, forecasting ad vertising costs is essential for making budget plans to optimize marketing campaign re turns. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive study using a variety of time-series forecasting methods to predict daily average cost-per-click in the online advertising mar ket. We show that forecasting advertising costs would benefit from multivariate models using covariates from competitors’ cost-per-click development identified through time series clustering. We further interpret the results by analyzing feature importance and temporal attention. Finally, we show that our approach holds several advantages over, first, models that individual advertisers might build based on their own data, and second, existing tools from Google