Learning Reliable User Representations from Volatile and Sparse Data to Accurately Predict Customer Lifetime Value

Abstract

In industry, customer lifetime value (LTV) prediction is a challenging task, since user consumption data is usually volatile, noisy, or sparse. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel Temporal-Structural User Representation (named TSUR) network to predict LTV. We utilize historical revenue time series and user attributes to learn both temporal and structural user representations, respectively. Specifically, the temporal representation is learned with a temporal trend encoder based on a novel multi-channel Discrete Wavelet Transform~(DWT) module, while the structural representation is derived with Graph Attention Network (GAT) on an attribute similarity graph. Furthermore, a novel cluster-alignment regularization method is employed to align and enhance these two kinds of representations. In essence, such a fusion way can be considered as the association of temporal and structural representations in the low-pass representation space, which is also useful to prevent the data noise from being transferred across different views. To our knowledge, it is the first time that temporal and structural user representations are jointly learned for LTV prediction. Extensive offline experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets and online A/B tests have shown the superiority of our approach over a number of competitive baselines.