Mobile Gamer Lifetime Value Prediction via Objective Decomposition and Reconstruction

Abstract: For Internet platforms operating real-time bidding (RTB) advertising service, a comprehensive understanding of user lifetime value (LTV) plays a pivotal role in optimizing advertisement allocation efficiency and maximizing the return on investment (ROI) for advertisement sponsors, thereby facilitating growth of commercialization revenue for the platform. However, the inherent complexity of user LTV distributions induces significant challenges in accurate LTV prediction. Existing state-of-the-art works, which primarily focus on directly learning the LTV distributions through well-designed loss functions, achieve limited success due to their vulnerability to outliers. In this paper, we proposed a novel LTV prediction method to address distribution challenges through an objective decomposition and reconstruction framework. Briefly speaking, based on the in-app purchase characteristics of mobile gamers, our model was designed to first predict the number of transactions at specific prices and then calculate the total payment amount from these intermediate predictions. Our proposed model was evaluated through experiments on real-world industrial dataset, and deployed on the TapTap RTB advertising system for online A/B testing along with the state-of-the-art ZILN model.