Session interest model for CTR prediction based on self-attention mechanism

Click-through rate prediction, which aims to predict the probability of the user clicking on an item, is critical to online advertising. How to capture the user evolving interests from the user behavior sequence is an important issue in CTR prediction. However, most existing models ignore the factor that the sequence is composed of sessions, and user behavior can be divided into different sessions according to the occurring time. The user behaviors are highly correlated in each session and are not relevant across sessions. We propose an effective model for CTR prediction, named Session Interest Model via Self-Attention (SISA). First, we divide the user sequential behavior into session layer. A self-attention mechanism with bias coding is used to model each session. Since different session interest may be related to each other or follow a sequential pattern, next, we utilize gated recurrent unit (GRU) to capture the interaction and evolution of user different historical session interests in session interest extractor module. Then, we use the local activation and GRU to aggregate their target ad to form the final representation of the behavior sequence in session interest interacting module. Experimental results show that the SISA model performs better than other models.