PeNet: A feature excitation learning approach to advertisement click-through rate prediction

Since the physical meaning of the fields of the dataset is unknown, we have to use the feature interaction method to select the correlated features and exclude uncorrelated features. The current state-of-the-art methods employ various methods based on feature interaction to predict advertisement Click-Through Rate (CTR); however, the feature interaction based on potential new feature mining is rarely considered, which can provide effective assistance for feature interaction. This motivates us to investigate methods that combine potential new features and feature interactions. Thus, we propose a potential feature excitation learning network (PeNet), which is a neural network model based on feature combination and feature interaction. In PeNet, we treat the row compression and column compression of the original feature matrix as potential new features, and proposed the excitation learning mechanism that is a weighted mechanism based on residual principle. Through this excitation learning mechanism, the original embedded features and potential new features are subjected to weighted interaction based on the residual principle. Moreover, a deep neural network is exploited to iteratively learn and iteratively combine features. The excitation learning structure of PeNet neural network is well demonstrated in this paper, that is, the control flow of embedding, compression, excitation and output, which further strengthens the correlated features and weakens the uncorrelated features by compressing and expanding the features. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets indicate the PeNet as a general-purpose plug-in has more superior performance and better efficiency than previous state-of-the-art methods.