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Contrastive self-supervised learning has been successfully used in many domains, such as images, texts, graphs, etc., to learn features without requiring label information. In this paper, we propose a new local contrastive feature learning (LoCL) framework, and our theme is to learn local patterns/features from tabular data. In order to create a niche for local learning, we use feature correlations to create a maximum-spanning tree, and break the tree into feature subsets, with strongly correlated features being assigned next to each other. Convolutional learning of the features is used to learn latent feature space, regulated by contrastive and reconstruction losses. Experiments on public tabular datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method versus state-of-the-art baseline methods. 

Online advertising, as a vast market, has gained significant attention in various platforms ranging from search engines, third-party websites, social media, and mobile apps. The prosperity of online campaigns is a challenge in online marketing and is usually evaluated by user response through different metrics, such as clicks on advertisement (ad) creatives, subscriptions to products, purchases of items, or explicit user feedback through online surveys. Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the number of studies using computational approaches, including machine learning methods, for user response prediction. However, existing literature mainly focuses on algorithmic-driven designs to solve specific challenges, and no comprehensive review exists to answer many important questions. What are the parties involved in the online digital advertising eco-systems? What type of data are available for user response prediction? How do we predict user response in a reliable and/or transparent way? In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of user response prediction in online advertising and related recommender applications. Our essential goal is to provide a thorough understanding of online advertising platforms, stakeholders, data availability, and typical ways of user response prediction. We propose a taxonomy to categorize state-of-the-art user response prediction methods, primarily focusing on the current progress of machine learning methods used in different online platforms. In addition, we also review applications of user response prediction, benchmark datasets, and open source codes in the field. 

In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework for user interest modeling and click prediction. Our goal is to accurately predict (1) the probability that a user clicks on an ad, and (2) the probability that a user clicks a specify type of campaign ad. To achieve the goal, we collect page information displayed to users as a temporal sequence, and use long-term-short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn latent features representing user interests. Experiments and comparisons on real-world data shows that, compared to existing static set based approaches, considering sequences and temporal variance of user requests results in an improvement in performance ad click prediction and campaign specific ad click prediction.