Neural Network Calibration for CTR Prediction

Ergun Biçici and Hasan Saribaş, Neural Network Calibration for CTR Prediction. 2023 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), Burdur, Turkiye, 2023, pp. 473-476, doi: 10.1109/UBMK59864.2023.10286733. URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10286733

After a machine learning model has been trained, calibration techniques correct its prediction errors to produce predictions that are more robust and confident. As calibration techniques, we implement isotonic regression, Platt's scaling, neural networks, spline regression, and temperature scaling and test them on the prediction of click-through rate (CTR), which is an unbalanced task. We use 3 neural network based CTR prediction models on a publicly available CTR dataset and measure the improvements. Our findings show that isotonic regression is the fastest method whereas isotonic regression and spline regression are the two techniques that improves the performance the most.

Efficiently Sampling in Neural Network Training for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Ergun Biçici and Serdarcan Dilbaz. Efficiently Sampling in Neural Network Training for Click-Through Rate Prediction. 2023 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), Burdur, Turkiye, 2023, pp. 469-472, doi: 10.1109/UBMK59864.2023.10286811. URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10286811

Finding efficient downsampling techniques has become more crucial as the training datasets for advertisement click-through rate (CTR) prediction models are growing to billions in size. We present efficient downsampling to sample CTR datasets with goals of faster training and limited decrease in the performance. We present encouraging results demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach on two publicly available CTR prediction datasets and compare efficient downsampling with stratified random downsampling.

Residual Fusion Models with Neural Networks for CTR Prediction

Ergun Biçici. Residual Fusion Models with Neural Networks for CTR Prediction. 2023 8th International Conference on Computer Science and Engineering (UBMK), Burdur, Turkiye, 2023, pp. 01-04, doi: 10.1109/UBMK59864.2023.10286706. URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10286706

No single prediction model achieves the best performance on all datasets and we are better off combining the strengths of different models for each task. Residual fusion learning is a two step combination method that trains a second model on the residual of the target from the first model's prediction. In the final phase, the predictions of both of these models are added. We use gradient boosting decision trees (GBDT) and neural networks for the initial model in residual fusion and compare three GBDT models and four neural network models. We introduce residual fusion with two different neural network models and show that we can achieve AUC gains that reach 0.95%.

Power Loss Function in Neural Networks for Predicting Click-Through Rate

Ergun Biçici. Power Loss Function in Neural Networks for Predicting Click-Through Rate. In Proc. of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), Singapore, September 2023. URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604915.3610658, https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.1145%252F3604915.3610658/reader

Loss functions guide machine learning models towards concentrating on the error most important to improve upon. We introduce power loss functions for neural networks and apply them on imbalanced click-through rate datasets. Power loss functions decrease the loss for confident predictions and increase the loss for error-prone predictions. They improve both AUC and F1 and produce better calibrated results. We obtain improvements in the results on four different classifiers and on two different datasets. We obtain significant improvements in AUC that reach 0.44% for DeepFM on the Avazu dataset.

Calibrating Neural Networks for CTR Prediction (Reklam Tıklama Oranını Tahmin Etmek için Sinir Ağlarının Kalibrasyonu)

Ergun Biçici and Hasan Saribaş. Calibrating Neural Networks for CTR Prediction (Reklam Tıklama Oranını Tahmin Etmek için Sinir Ağlarının Kalibrasyonu). In Proc. of the 31st Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU), Istanbul, Turkey, July 2023. URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10223867

Calibration methods fix the prediction errors of a machine learning model after it is trained and enable more robust and more confident prediction. We implement isotonic regression, Platt's scaling, neural networks, spline regression, and temperature scaling as calibration techniques on the prediction of click-through rate (CTR), which is an unbalanced task. We compare the improvements on using 3 neural network based CTR prediction models, Masknet, DeepFM, and DCNv2, on the publicly available CTR dataset Avazu. Our results demonstrate that isotonic and spline regression methods improve the most and isotonic regression is the fastest method.

Kalibrasyon yöntemleri, bir makine öğrenimi modelinin eğitildikten sonraki tahmin hatalarını düzelterek daha gürbüz ve daha güvenli tahmin yapılmasını sağlar. Bu çalışmada, dengesiz etiketlere sahip bir görev olan reklam tıklama oranının (RTO) tahmininde, kalibrasyon teknikleri olarak izotonik regresyon, Platt'ın ölçeklendirmesi, sinir ağları, eğri regresyonu, ve sıcaklık ölçeklendirmesi uygulanmıştır. Bu kalibrasyon yöntemlerinin karşılaştırılması için halka açık veri seti olan Avazu üzerinde, MaskNet, DeepFM, ve DCNv2 olmak üzere sinir ağı tabanlı üç farklı RTO tahmin modeli kullanılmıştır. Yapılan deneyler, izotonik ve eğri regresyon yöntemlerinin en iyi şekilde performansı arttırdığını ayrıca izotonik regresyonun en hızlı yöntem olduğunu göstermektedir.

Machine Translation Performance Prediction System: Optimal Prediction for Optimal Translation

Ergun Biçici. Machine Translation Performance Prediction System: Optimal Prediction for Optimal Translation. Springer Nature Computer Science, 3, 2022. ISSN: 2661-8907. [doi:10.1007/s42979-022-01183-0]

Machine translation performance prediction (MTPP) system (MTPPS) is an automatic, accurate, language and natural language processing (NLP) output independent prediction model. MTPPS is optimal by the capability to predict translation performance without even using the translation by using only the source, bypassing MT model complexity. MTPPS was casted for tasks involving similarity of text in machine translation (MT), semantic similarity, and parsing of sentences. We present large scale modeling and prediction experiments on MTPP dataset (MTPPDAT) covering $3800$ document- and $380000$ sentence-level prediction in $7$ different domains using $3800$ different MT systems. We provide theoretical and experimental results, empirical lower and upper bounds on the prediction tasks, rank the features used, and present current results. We show that we only need $57$ labeled instances at the document-level and $17$ at the sentence-level to reach current prediction results. MTPPS achieve $4\%$ error rate at the document-level and $45\%$ at the sentence-level relative to the magnitude of the target, $61\%$ and $27\%$ relatively better than a mean predictor correspondingly, and $40\%$ better than the nearest neighbor baseline. Referential translation machines use MTPPS and achieve top results.

RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task

 Ergun Biçici. RTM Super Learner Results at Quality Estimation Task. In Proc. of the Sixth Conference on Statistical Machine Translation (WMT21), Online, November 2021.

We obtain new results using referential translation machines (RTMs) with predictions mixed to obtain a better mixture of experts prediction. Our super learner results improve the results and provide a robust combination model.