Advertising platforms have a growing need for improving prediction quality, as missing out on ad opportunities can have a negative effect on their performance. To that end, prediction tasks such as conversion prediction need to be continuously advanced through the inclusion of data from new sources or through algorithmic development that tackles existing challenges. The introduction of different data sources naturally brings unwanted noise, whereas underexplored areas still exist in modeling approaches, such as temporal information of events in sequences. In this study, we propose extensions for modeling online user activity trails that address two very important aspects of activities-time and noise, through dedicated layers that can be used in existing deep sequence-learning approaches. Our proposed method exhibited area under the receiver operating characteristic curve improvement of up to 3% and 1.75% compared with production and best baseline approaches, respectively, across two major advertiser data sets and several predictive tasks.
Keywords: computational advertising; deep learning; discretized representations; time-aware modeling; user activity trails.