Learning Continuous User Representations through Hybrid Filtering with doc2vec

Players in the online ad ecosystem are struggling to acquire the user data required for precise targeting. Audience look-alike modeling has the potential to alleviate this issue, but models’ performance strongly depends on quantity and quality of available data. In order to maximize the predictive performance of our look-alike modeling algorithms, we propose two novel hybrid filtering techniques that utilize the recent neural probabilistic language model algorithm doc2vec. We apply these methods to data from a large mobile ad exchange and additional app metadata acquired from the Apple App store and Google Play store. First, we model mobile app users through their app usage histories and app descriptions (user2vec). Second, we introduce context awareness to that model by incorporating additional user and app-related metadata in model training (context2vec). Our findings are threefold: (1) the quality of recommendations provided by user2vec is notably higher than current state-of-the-art techniques. (2) User representations generated through hybrid filtering using doc2vec prove to be highly valuable features in supervised machine learning models for look-alike modeling. This represents the first application of hybrid filtering user models using neural probabilistic language models, specifically doc2vec, in look-alike modeling. (3) Incorporating context metadata in the doc2vec model training process to introduce context awareness has positive effects on performance and is superior to directly including the data as features in the downstream supervised models.