GBDT4CTRVis: visual analytics of gradient boosting decision tree for advertisement click-through rate prediction

Abstract

Gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT) is a mainstream model for advertisement click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Since the complex working mechanism of GBDT, advertising analysts often fail to analyze the decision-making and the iterative evolution process of a large number of decision trees, as well as to understand the impact of different features on the prediction results, which makes the model tuning quite challenging. To address these challenges, we propose a visual analytics system, GBDT4CTRVis, which helps advertising analysts understand the working mechanism of GBDT and facilitate model tuning through intuitive and interactive views. Specifically, we propose instance-level views to hierarchically explore the prediction results of advertising data, feature-level views to analyze the importance of features and their correlations from various perspectives, and model-level views to investigate the structure of representative decision trees and the temporal evolution of information gain during model prediction. We also provide multi-view interactions and panel control for flexible exploration. Finally, we evaluate GBDT4CTRVis through three case studies and expert evaluations. Feedback from experts indicated the usefulness and effectiveness of GBDT4CTRVis in helping to understand the model mechanism and tune the model.

Graphical abstract