Open Benchmarking for Click-Through Rate Prediction
This work addresses the problem of non-reproducible and inconsistent results in CTR prediction research, which limits practical impact for researchers and industry, though it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than new modeling.
The authors tackled the lack of standardized benchmarks in click-through rate (CTR) prediction by building BARS-CTR, an open benchmark that re-evaluated 24 existing models over 7,000 experiments and 12,000 GPU hours, revealing that many deep models have smaller performance differences than expected.
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task for many applications, as its accuracy has a direct impact on user experience and platform revenue. In recent years, CTR prediction has been widely studied in both academia and industry, resulting in a wide variety of CTR prediction models. Unfortunately, there is still a lack of standardized benchmarks and uniform evaluation protocols for CTR prediction research. This leads to non-reproducible or even inconsistent experimental results among existing studies, which largely limits the practical value and potential impact of their research. In this work, we build an open benchmark for CTR prediction, namely BARS-CTR, and present a rigorous comparison of different models in a reproducible manner. To this end, we ran over 7,000 experiments for more than 12,000 GPU hours in total to re-evaluate 24 existing models on multiple datasets and settings. Surprisingly, our experiments show that with sufficient hyper-parameter search and model tuning, many deep models have smaller differences than expected. The results also reveal that making real progress on the modeling of CTR prediction is indeed a very challenging research task. We believe that our benchmarking work could not only allow researchers to gauge the effectiveness of new models conveniently but also make them fairly compare with the state of the arts. We have publicly released the benchmarking code, evaluation protocols, and hyper-parameter settings of our work to promote reproducible research in this field.