STARDOM: Semantic Aware Deep Hierarchical Forecasting Model for Search Traffic Prediction

We study the search traffic forecasting problem for guaranteed search advertising (GSA) application in e-commerce platforms. The consumers express their purchase intents by posing queries to the e-commerce search engine. GSA is a type of guaranteed delivery (GD) advertising strategy, which forecasts the traffic of search queries, and charges the advertisers according to the predicted volumes of search queries the advertisers willing to buy. We employ the time series forecasting method to make the search traffic prediction. Different from existing time series prediction methods, search queries are semantically meaningful, with semantically similar queries possessing similar time series. And they can be grouped according to the brands or categories they belong to, exhibiting hierarchical structures. To fully take advantage of these characteristics, we design a SemanTic AwaRe Deep hierarchical fOrecasting Model (STARDOM for short) which explores the queries' semantic information and the hierarchical structures formed by the queries. Specifically, to exploit hierarchical structure, we propose a reconciliation learning module. It leverages deep learning model to learn the reconciliation relation between the hierarchical series in the latent space automatically, and forces the coherence constraints through a distill reconciliation loss. To exploit semantic information, we propose a semantic representation module and generate semantic aware series embeddings for queries. Extensive experiments are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.