Advertising and feed ranking are essential to many Internet companies such as Facebook and Sina Weibo. Among many real-world advertising and feed ranking systems, click through rate (CTR) prediction plays a central role. There are many proposed models in this field such as logistic regression, tree based models, factorization machine based models and deep learning based CTR models. However, many current works calculate the feature interactions in a simple way such as Hadamard product and inner product and they care less about the importance of features. In this paper, a new model named FiBiNET as an abbreviation for Feature Importance and Bilinear feature Interaction NETwork is proposed to dynamically learn the feature importance and fine-grained feature interactions. On the one hand, the FiBiNET can dynamically learn the importance of features via the Squeeze-Excitation network (SENET) mechanism; on the other hand, it is able to effectively learn the feature interactions via bilinear function. We conduct extensive experiments on two realworld datasets and show that our shallow model outperforms other shallow models such as factorization machine(FM) and field-aware factorization machine(FFM). In order to improve performance further, we combine a classical deep neural network(DNN) component with the shallow model to be a deep model. The deep FiBiNET consistently outperforms the other state-of-the-art deep models such as DeepFM and extreme deep factorization machine(XdeepFM).
The application to search ranking is one of the biggest machine learning success stories at Airbnb. Much of the initial gains were driven by a gradient boosted decision tree model. The gains, however, plateaued over time. This paper discusses the work done in applying neural networks in an attempt to break out of that plateau. We present our perspective not with the intention of pushing the frontier of new modeling techniques. Instead, ours is a story of the elements we found useful in applying neural networks to a real life product. Deep learning was steep learning for us. To other teams embarking on similar journeys, we hope an account of our struggles and triumphs will provide some useful pointers. Bon voyage!
Many Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms are item-based in the sense that they analyze item-item relations in order to produce item similarities.
Recently, several works in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) suggested to learn a latent representation of words using neural embedding algorithms. Among them, the Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS), also known as [[Word2Vec]], was shown to provide state-of-the-art results on various linguistics tasks.
In this paper, we show that item-based CF can be cast in the same framework of neural word embedding.
Inspired by SGNS, we describe a method we name item2vec for item-based CF that produces embedding for items in a latent space.
The method is capable of inferring item-item relations even when user information is not available.
We present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the item2vec method and show it is competitive with SVD.