Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Online Multi-touch Attribution

Abstract: In online advertising, users may be exposed to a range of different advertising campaigns, such as natural search or referral or organic search, before leading to a final transaction. Estimating the contribution of advertising campaigns on the user's journey is very meaningful and crucial. A marketer could observe each customer's interaction with different marketing channels and modify their investment strategies accordingly. Existing methods including both traditional last-clicking methods and recent data-driven approaches for the multi-touch attribution (MTA) problem lack enough interpretation on why the methods work. In this paper, we propose a novel model called DeepMTA, which combines deep learning model and additive feature explanation model for interpretable online multi-touch attribution. DeepMTA mainly contains two parts, the phased-LSTMs based conversion prediction model to catch different time intervals, and the additive feature attribution model combined with shaley values. Additive feature attribution is explanatory that contains a linear function of binary variables. As the first interpretable deep learning model for MTA, DeepMTA considers three important features in the customer journey: event sequence order, event frequency and time-decay effect of the event. Evaluation on a real dataset shows the proposed conversion prediction model achieves 91\% accuracy.