Local Contrastive Feature learning for Tabular Data

Contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully used in many domains, such as images, texts, graphs, etc., to learn features without requiring label information. In this paper, we propose a new local contrastive feature learning (LoCL) framework, and our theme is to learn local patterns/features from tabular data. In order to create a niche for local learning, we use feature correlations to create a maximum-spanning tree, and break the tree into feature subsets, with strongly correlated features being assigned next to each other. Convolutional learning of the features is used to learn latent feature space, regulated by contrastive and reconstruction losses. Experiments on public tabular datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method versus state-of-the-art baseline methods.

User Response Prediction in Online Advertising

Online advertising, as the vast market, has gained significant attention in various platforms ranging from search engines, third-party websites, social media, and mobile apps. The prosperity of online campaigns is a challenge in online marketing and is usually evaluated by user response through different metrics, such as clicks on advertisement (ad) creatives, subscriptions to products, purchases of items, or explicit user feedback through online surveys. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of studies using computational approaches, including machine learning methods, for user response prediction. However, existing literature mainly focuses on algorithmic-driven designs to solve specific challenges, and no comprehensive review exists to answer many important questions. What are the parties involved in the online digital advertising eco-systems? What type of data are available for user response prediction? How to predict user response in a reliable and/or transparent way? In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of user response prediction in online advertising and related recommender applications. Our essential goal is to provide a thorough understanding of online advertising platforms, stakeholders, data availability, and typical ways of user response prediction. We propose a taxonomy to categorize state-of-the-art user response prediction methods, primarily focus on the current progress of machine learning methods used in different online platforms. In addition, we also review applications of user response prediction, benchmark datasets, and open-source codes in the field.

TriNE: Network Representation Learning for Tripartite Heterogeneous Networks

In this paper, we study network representation learning for tripartite heterogeneous networks which learns node representation features for networks with three types of node entities. We argue that tripartite networks are common in real world applications, and the essential challenge of the representation learning is the heterogeneous relations between various node types and links in the network. To tackle the challenge, we develop a tripartite heterogeneous network embedding called TriNE. The method considers unique user-item-tag tripartite relationships, to build an objective function to model explicit relationships between nodes (observed links), and also capture implicit relationships between tripartite nodes (unobserved links across tripartite node sets). The method organizes metapath guided random walks to create heterogeneous neighborhood for all node types in the network. This information is then utilized to train a heterogeneous skip-gram model based on a joint optimization. Experiments on real-world tripartite networks validate the performance of TriNE for the online user response prediction using embedding node features.