Disguise adversarial networks for click-through rate prediction

We introduced an adversarial learning framework for improving CTR prediction in Ads recommendation. Our approach was motivated by observing the extremely low click-through rate and imbalanced label distribution in the historical Ads impressions. We hence proposed a Disguise-Adversarial-Networks (DAN) to improve the accuracy of supervised learning with limited positive-class information. In the context of CTR prediction, the rationality behind DAN could be intuitively understood as "non-clicked Ads makeup". DAN disguises the disliked Ads impressions (non-clicks) to be interesting ones and encourages a discriminator to classify these disguised Ads as positive recommendations. In an adversarial aspect, the discriminator should be sober-minded which is optimized to allocate these disguised Ads to their inherent classes according to an unsupervised information theoretic assignment strategy. We applied DAN to two Ads datasets including both mobile and display Ads for CTR prediction. The results showed that our DAN approach significantly outperformed other supervised learning and generative adversarial networks (GAN) in CTR prediction.