Ad click prediction using machine learning algorithms

Abstract

Online advertising has a great potential to boost business’ revenue. One of the key metrics that defines the success of online ad campaigns is click through rate (CTR) which indicates the total number of clicks received in relation to the total impression. Therefore, the click prediction systems, which have the aim of increasing the click through rates of online advertising campaigns by predicting the clicks, have become essential for businesses. For this reason, predicting whether an advertisement will receive a click from the user or not attracts the attention of researchers from the both industry and academia. In this capstone project, the click prediction is studied by using Avazu’s click logs dataset. The effects of having high cardinality categorical features and imbalanced data are examined during data preprocessing phase and then relevant features are selected to be used in modeling. The methods that are used for this classification problem are decision trees, random forest, k-nearest neighbor, extreme gradient boosting, and logistic regression. According to the results of the study, extreme gradient boosting shows the best performance.