Field-aware Factorization Machines for CTR Prediction
TLDR
Just a simple extension of the 2010 Factorization Machines paper, where essentially instead of just modeling pairwise feature interactions, you model pairwise feature interactions for each 'field', or feature categories. Same idea though, basically just a linear regression with some feature special-sauce baked in. Basically while before you only had one latent vector $v_i$ for each feature $x_i$ before, you have multiple latent vectors. Then when modeling interactions between $x_i$ and $x_j$, the model uses the latent vector $x_i,f$ that is associated with $x_j$'s field $f$ feature category. So, just a slightly more flexible {w/ more parameters} approach that can model different feature interactions based on the category of features interacting.
Still probably not used much today when there's big data involved.
Summary
Field-aware Factorization Machines {FFMs} are an extension of Factorization Machines {FMs}, designed specifically to handle categorical data, which is common in many real-world applications such as click-through rate {CTR} prediction.
In traditional FMs, a feature interaction is modeled by the dot product of two latent vectors corresponding to the two features. However, in FFMs, each feature has multiple latent vectors, and the specific vector used to model an interaction depends on the "field" of the other feature in the interaction.
A field can be thought of as a high-level category that a feature belongs to. For example, in a movie recommendation system, movie ID, movie genre, and director might be different fields.
The FFM model is defined by the equation:
[ \hat{y}(\mathbf{x}) = w_0 + \sum_{i=1}^{n} w_i x_i + \sum_{i=1}^{n} \sum_{j=i+1}^{n} \langle \mathbf{v}{i,f_j}, \mathbf{v}{j,f_i} \rangle x_i x_j ]
where:
- (\hat{y}(\mathbf{x})) is the predicted target variable.
- (w_0) is the global bias.
- (w_i) are the weights of the model.
- (\mathbf{x}) is the feature vector.
- (\mathbf{v}{i,f_j}) and (\mathbf{v}{j,f_i}) are latent vectors that capture interactions between the (i)th feature and the field of the (j)th feature, and vice versa.
- (\langle \mathbf{v}{i,f_j}, \mathbf{v}{j,f_i} \rangle) is the dot product of these latent vectors.
- (f_i) and (f_j) are the fields of the (i)th and (j)th features respectively.
The main advantage of FFMs over standard FMs is that they can model higher-order feature interactions and capture more complex patterns in the data. This makes them particularly effective for tasks like CTR prediction, where interactions between high-level categories can be very informative.
The model parameters {i.e., the weights and latent vectors} can be learned using any standard optimization algorithm, such as stochastic gradient descent or alternating least squares.
The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of FFMs through a series of experiments on real-world datasets, showing that FFMs outperform other state-of-the-art methods in terms of prediction accuracy.
The implications of this work are significant for the field of recommendation systems and more generally for any problem involving high-dimensional categorical data. By providing a flexible and efficient way to model field-aware feature interactions, FFMs offer a powerful tool for predictive modeling in these settings.
Tags: factorization, 2016