Fusion of GBDT and neural network for click-through rate estimation

Aiming at the issue that the current click-through rate prediction methods ignore the varying impacts of different input features on prediction accuracy and exhibit low accuracy when dealing with large-scale data, a click-through rate prediction method (GBIFM) which combines Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) and Input-aware Factorization Machine (IFM) is proposed in this paper. The proposed GBIFM method employs GBDT for data processing, which can flexibly handle various types of data without the need for one-hot encoding of discrete features. An Input-aware strategy is introduced to refine the weight vector and embedding vector of each feature for different instances, adaptively learning the impact of each input vector on feature representation. Furthermore, a fully connected network is incorporated to capture high-order features in a non-linear manner, enhancing the method’s ability to express and generalize complex structured data. A comprehensive experiment is conducted on the Criteo and Avazu datasets, the results show that compared to typical methods such as DeepFM, AFM, and IFM, the proposed method GBIFM can increase the AUC value by 10% –12% and decrease the Logloss value by 6% –20%, effectively improving the accuracy of click-through rate prediction.