Search Results (15)

In large-scale e-commerce, recommendation systems must overcome the shortcomings of conventional models, which often struggle to convert user interest into purchases. This study proposes a revenue-driven recommendation approach that explicitly incorporates user price sensitivity. This study introduces a hybrid recommendation engine that combines collaborative filtering (CF), best match 25 (BM25) for textual relevance, and a price-similarity algorithm. The system is deployed within a scalable three-tier architecture using Elasticsearch and Redis to maintain stability under high-traffic conditions. The system’s performance was evaluated through a large-scale A/B test against both a CF-only model and a popular-item baseline. Results showed that while the CF-only model reduced revenue by 5.10%, our hybrid system increased revenue by 5.55% and improved click-through rate (CTR) by 2.55%. These findings demonstrate that integrating price similarity is an effective strategy for developing commercially viable recommendation systems that enhance both user engagement and revenue growth on large online platforms. Full article

Online advertising is vital for reaching target audiences and promoting products. In 2020, US online advertising revenue increased by 12.2% to $139.8 billion. The industry is projected to reach $487.32 billion by 2030. Artificial intelligence has improved click-through rates (CTR), enabling personalized advertising content by analyzing user behavior and providing real-time predictions. This review examines the latest CTR prediction solutions, particularly those based on deep learning, over the past three years. This timeframe was chosen because CTR prediction has rapidly advanced in recent years, particularly with transformer architectures, multimodal fusion techniques, and industrial applications. By focusing on the last three years, the review highlights the most relevant developments not covered in earlier surveys. This review classifies CTR prediction methods into two main categories: CTR prediction techniques employing text and CTR prediction approaches utilizing multivariate data. The methods that use multivariate data to predict CTR are further categorized into four classes: graph-based methods, feature-interaction-based techniques, customer-behavior approaches, and cross-domain methods. The review also outlines current challenges and future research opportunities. The review highlights that graph-based and multimodal methods currently dominate state-of-the-art CTR prediction, while feature-interaction and cross-domain approaches provide complementary strengths. These key takeaways frame open challenges and emerging research directions. Full article

The cold-start problem remains a critical challenge in personalized advertising, where users with limited or no interaction history often receive suboptimal recommendations. This study introduces a novel, three-stage framework that systematically integrates transformer architectures and large language models (LLMs) to improve recommendation accuracy, transparency, and user experience throughout the entire advertising pipeline. The proposed approach begins with transformer-enhanced feature extraction, leveraging self-attention and learned positional encodings to capture deep semantic relationships among users, ads, and context. It then employs an ensemble integration strategy combining enhanced state-of-the-art models with optimized aggregation for robust prediction. Finally, an LLM-driven enhancement module performs semantic reranking, personalized message refinement, and natural language explanation generation while also addressing cold-start scenarios through pre-trained knowledge. The LLM component further supports diversification, fairness-aware ranking, and sentiment sensitivity in order to ensure more relevant, diverse, and ethically grounded recommendations. Extensive experiments on DigiX and Avazu datasets demonstrate notable gains in click-through rate prediction (CTR), while an in-depth real user evaluation showcases improvements in perceived ad relevance, message quality, transparency, and trust. This work advances the state-of-the-art by combining CTR models with interpretability and contextual reasoning. The strengths of the proposed method, such as its innovative integration of components, empirical validation, multifaceted LLM application, and ethical alignment highlight its potential as a robust, future-ready solution for personalized advertising. Full article

This study explores the application of spiking neural networks (SNNs) for click-through rate (CTR) prediction in personalized online advertising systems, introducing a novel hybrid model, the Temporal Rate Spike with Attention Neural Network (TRA–SNN). By leveraging the biological plausibility and energy efficiency of SNNs, combined with attention-based mechanisms, the TRA–SNN model captures temporal dynamics and rate-based patterns to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based models, such as Deep & Cross Network v2 (DCN-V2) and FinalMLP. The models were trained and evaluated on the Avazu and Digix datasets, using standard metrics like AUC-ROC and accuracy. Through rigorous hyperparameter tuning and standardized preprocessing, this study ensures fair comparisons across models, highlighting SNNs’ potential for scalable, sustainable deployment in resource-constrained environments like mobile devices and large-scale ad platforms. This work is the first to apply SNNs to CTR prediction, setting a new benchmark for energy-efficient predictive modeling and opening avenues for future research in hybrid SNN–ANN architectures across domains like finance, healthcare, and autonomous systems. Full article

In the era of information explosion, recommendation systems play a crucial role in filtering vast amounts of content for users. Traditional recommendation models leverage knowledge graphs, sentiment analysis, social capital, and generative AI to enhance personalization. However, existing models still struggle to adapt dynamically to users’ evolving interests across multiple content domains in real-time. To address this gap, the cross-domain adaptive recommendation system (CDARS) is proposed, which integrates real-time behavioral tracking with multi-domain knowledge graphs to refine user preference modeling continuously. Unlike conventional methods that rely on static or historical data, CDARS dynamically adjusts its recommendation strategies based on contextual factors such as real-time engagement, sentiment fluctuations, and implicit preference drifts. Furthermore, a novel explainable adaptive learning (EAL) module was introduced, providing transparent insights into recommendations’ evolving nature, thereby improving user trust and system interpretability. To enable such real-time adaptability, CDARS incorporates multimodal sentiment analysis of user-generated content, behavioral pattern mining (e.g., click timing, revisit frequency), and learning trajectory modeling through time-aware embeddings and incremental updates of user representations. These dynamic signals are mapped into evolving knowledge graphs, forming continuously updated learning charts that drive more context-aware and emotionally intelligent recommendations. Our experimental results on datasets spanning social media, e-commerce, and entertainment domains demonstrate that CDARS significantly enhances recommendation relevance, achieving an average improvement of 7.8% in click-through rate (CTR) and 8.3% in user engagement compared to state-of-the-art models. This research presents a paradigm shift toward truly dynamic and explainable recommendation systems, creating a way for more personalized and user-centric experiences in the digital landscape. Full article

The click-through rate (CTR) forecast is among the mainstream research directions in the domain of recommender systems, especially in online advertising suggestions. Among them, the multilayer perceptron (MLP) has been extensively utilized as the cornerstone of deep CTR prediction models. However, current neural network-based CTR prediction models commonly employ a single MLP network to capture nonlinear interactions between high-order features, while disregarding the interaction among differentiated features, resulting in poor model performance. Although studies such as DeepFM have proposed dual-branch interaction models to learn complex features, they still fall short of achieving more nuanced feature fusion. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model, the Deep Double Towers model (DDT), which improves the accuracy of CTR prediction through multi-head bilinear fusion while incorporating symmetry in its architecture. Specifically, the DDT model leverages symmetric parallel MLP networks to capture the interactions between differentiated features in a more structured and balanced manner. Furthermore, the multi-head bilinear fusion layer enables refined feature fusion through symmetry-aware operations, ensuring that feature interactions are aligned and symmetrically integrated. Experimental results on publicly available datasets, such as Criteo and Avazu, show that DDT surpasses existing models in improving the accuracy of CTR prediction, with symmetry contributing to more effective and balanced feature fusion. Full article

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction plays a crucial role in online services and applications, such as online shopping and advertising. The performance of CTR prediction can have a direct impact on user experience and the revenue of the online platforms. For CTR prediction models, self-attention-based methods have been widely applied to this field. Recent works generally adopted the Transformer architecture, where the self-attention mechanism can capture the global dependencies of the user’s historical interactions and predict the next item. Despite the effectiveness of self-attention methods in modeling sequential user behaviors, most sequential recommenders hardly exploit feature interaction techniques to extract high-order feature combinations. In this paper, we propose a Feature-Interaction-Enhanced Sequence Model (FESeq), which integrates feature interaction and the sequential recommendation model in a cascading structure. Specifically, the interacting layer in FESeq is an automatic feature engineering step for the Transformer model. Then, we add a linear time interval embedding layer and a positional embedding layer to the Transformer in the sequence-refiner layer to learn both the time intervals and the position information in the user’s sequence behaviors. We also design an attention-based sequence pooling layer that can model the relevance of the user’s historical behaviors and the target item representation through scaled bilinear attention. Our experiments show that the proposed method beats all the baselines on both public and industrial datasets. Full article

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a research point for measuring recommendation systems and calculating AD traffic. Existing studies have proved that deep learning performs very well in prediction tasks, but most of the existing studies are based on deterministic models, and there is a big gap in capturing uncertainty. Modeling uncertainty is a major challenge when using machine learning solutions to solve real-world problems in various domains. In order to quantify the uncertainty of the model and achieve accurate and reliable prediction results. This paper designs a CTR prediction framework combining feature selection and feature interaction. In this framework, a CTR prediction model based on Bayesian deep learning is proposed to quantify the uncertainty in the prediction model. On the squeeze network and DNN parallel prediction model framework, the approximate posterior parameter distribution of the model is obtained using the Monte Carlo dropout, and obtains the integrated prediction results. Epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty are defined and adopt information entropy to calculate the sum of the two kinds of uncertainties. Epistemic uncertainty could be measured by mutual information. Experimental results show that the model proposed is superior to other models in terms of prediction performance and has the ability to quantify uncertainty. Full article

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is crucial for computing advertisement and recommender systems. The key challenge of CTR prediction is to accurately capture user interests and deliver suitable advertisements to the right people. However, there are an immense number of features in CTR prediction datasets, which hardly fit when only using an individual feature. To solve this problem, feature interaction that combines several features via an operation is introduced to enhance prediction performance. Many factorizations machine-based models and deep learning methods have been proposed to capture feature interaction for CTR prediction. They follow an enumeration-filter pattern that could not determine the appropriate order of feature interaction and useful feature interaction. The attention logarithmic network (ALN) is presented in this paper, which uses logarithmic neural networks (LNN) to model feature interactions, and the squeeze excitation (SE) mechanism to adaptively model the importance of higher-order feature interactions. At first, the embedding vector of the input was absolutized and a very small positive number was added to the zeros of the embedding vector, which made the LNN input positive. Then, the adaptive-order feature interactions were learned by logarithmic transformation and exponential transformation in the LNN. Finally, SE was applied to model the importance of high-order feature interactions adaptively for enhancing CTR performance. Based on this, the attention logarithmic interaction network (ALIN) was proposed for the effectiveness and accuracy of CTR, which integrated Newton’s identity into ALN. ALIN supplements the loss of information, which is caused by the operation becoming positive and by adding a small positive value to the embedding vector. Experiments are conducted on two datasets, and the results prove that ALIN is efficient and effective. Full article

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction can provide considerable economic and social benefits. Few studies have considered the importance of low-order features, usually employing a simple feature interaction method. To address these issues, we propose a novel model called Senet and extreme deep field-embedded factorization machine (Se-xDFEFM) for more effective CTR prediction. We first embed the squeeze-excitation network (Senet) module into Se-xDFEFM to complete low-order feature refinement, which can better filter noisy information. Then, we implement our field-embedded factorization machine (FEFM) to learn the symmetric matrix embeddings for each field pair, along with the single-vector embeddings for each feature, which builds a firm foundation for the subsequent feature interaction. Finally, we design a compressed interaction network (CIN) to realize feature construction with definite order through a vector-wise interaction. We use a deep neural network (DNN) with the CIN to simultaneously implement effective but complementary explicit and implicit feature interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the Se-xDFEFM model outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines. Our model is effective and robust for CTR prediction. Importantly, our model variants also achieve competitive recommendation performance, demonstrating their scalability. Full article

CTR (Click-Through Rate) prediction has attracted more and more attention from academia and industry for its significant contribution to revenue. In the last decade, learning feature interactions have become a mainstream research direction, and dozens of feature interaction-based models have been proposed for the CTR prediction task. The most common approach for existing models is to enumerate all possible feature interactions or to learn higher-order feature interactions by designing complex models. However, a simple enumeration will introduce meaningless and harmful interactions, and a complex model structure will bring a higher complexity. In this work, we propose a lightweight, yet effective model called the Gated Adaptive feature Interaction Network (GAIN). We devise a novel cross module to drop meaningless feature interactions and preserve informative ones. Our cross module consists of multiple gated units, each of which can independently learn an arbitrary-order feature interaction. We combine the cross module with a deep module into GAIN and conduct comparative experiments with state-of-the-art models on two public datasets to verify its validity. Our experimental results show that GAIN can achieve a comparable or even better performance compared to its competitors. Furthermore, in order to verify the effectiveness of the feature interactions learned by GAIN, we transfer learned interactions to other models, such as Logistic Regression (LR) and Factorization Machines (FM), and find out that their performance can be significantly improved. Full article

Among the inherent problems in recommendation systems are data sparseness and cold starts; the solutions to which lie in the introduction of knowledge graphs to improve the performance of the recommendation systems. The results in previous research, however, suffer from problems such as data compression, information damage, and insufficient learning. Therefore, a DeepFM Graph Convolutional Network (DFM-GCN) model was proposed to alleviate the above issues. The prediction of the click-through rate (CTR) is critical in recommendation systems where the task is to estimate the probability that a user will click on a recommended item. In many recommendation systems, the goal is to maximize the number of clicks so the items returned to a user can be ranked by an estimated CTR. The DFM-GCN model consists of three parts: the left part DeepFM is used to capture the interactive information between the users and items; the deep neural network is used in the middle to model the left and right parts; and the right one obtains a better item representation vector by the GCN. In an effort to verify the validity and precision of the model built in this research, and based on the public datasets ml1m-kg20m and ml1m-kg1m, a performance comparison experiment was designed. It used multiple comparison models and the MKR and FM_MKR algorithms as well as the DFM-GCN algorithm constructed in this paper. Having achieved a state-of-the-art performance, the experimental results of the AUC and f1 values verified by the CTR as well as the accuracy, recall, and f1 values of the top-k showed that the proposed approach was excellent and more effective when compared with different recommendation algorithms. Full article

The user, usage, and usability (3U’s) are three principal constituents for cyber security. The effective analysis of the 3U data using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques allows to deduce valuable observations, which allow domain experts to design practical strategies to alleviate cyberattacks and ensure decision support. Many internet applications, such as internet advertising and recommendation systems, rely on click-through rate (CTR) prediction to anticipate the possibility that a user would click on an ad or product, which is key for understanding human online behaviour. However, online systems are prone to click on fraud attacks. We propose a Human-Centric Cyber Security (HCCS) model that additionally includes AI techniques targeted at the key elements of user, usage, and usability. As a case study, we analyse a CTR prediction task, using deep learning methods (factorization machines) to predict online fraud through clickbait. The results of experiments on a real-world benchmark Avazu dataset show that the proposed approach outpaces (AUC is 0.8062) other CTR forecasting approaches, demonstrating the viability of the proposed framework. Full article

With the development of E-commerce, online advertising began to thrive and has gradually developed into a new mode of business, of which Click-Through Rates (CTR) prediction is the essential driving technology. Given a user, commodities and scenarios, the CTR model can predict the user’s click probability of an online advertisement. Recently, great progress has been made with the introduction of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) into CTR. In order to further advance the DNN-based CTR prediction models, this paper introduces a new model of FO-FTRL-DCN, based on the prestigious model of Deep&Cross Network (DCN) augmented with the latest optimization technique of Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL) for DNN. The extensive comparative experiments on the iPinYou datasets show that the proposed model has outperformed other state-of-the-art baselines, with better generalization across different datasets in the benchmark. Full article

In recent years, the research of combining a knowledge graph with recommendation systems has caused widespread concern. By studying the interconnections in knowledge graphs, potential connections between users and items can be discovered, which provides abundant and complementary information for recommendation of items. However, most existing studies have not effectively established the relation between entities and users. Therefore, the recommendation results may be affected by some unrelated entities. In this paper, we propose a neighborhood aggregation collaborative filtering (NACF) based on knowledge graph. It uses the knowledge graph to spread and extract the user’s potential interest, and iteratively injects them into the user features with attentional deviation. We conducted a large number of experiments on three public datasets; we verifyied that NACF is ahead of the most advanced models in top-k recommendation and click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Full article