2D-ATT: Causal Inference for Mobile Game Organic Installs with 2-Dimensional Attentional Neural Network

Boxiang Dong, Hui Bill Li, Yang Ryan Wang, Rami Safadi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

In the mobile gaming industry, organic installs refer to downloads that cannot be attributed to any advertising channel and thus do not introduce upfront user acquisition (UA) cost. Understanding the causal factors on organic installs is of vital importance for a game's ecosystem, as such knowledge can help bring in more organic users, who tend to be more loyal and active. A major challenge in discovering the causal effects is the potential temporal lag between an UA operation and the growth in organic installs. In this paper, we solve the problem by using a deep attentional neural network to analyze multivariate time series data. The core of our design is a novel attention mechanism, namely 2D-ATT, that can learn the contribution of each feature to the target at different levels of temporal delay. Our experiments on a series of synthetic datasets show that 2D-ATT outperforms existing approaches for discovering complex causal effects. We also use 2D-ATT to analyze a real-world mobile game dataset collected by Jam City, a video game company based in California. Our discoveries provide valuable insights to UA operations.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
EditorsXintao Wu, Chris Jermaine, Li Xiong, Xiaohua Tony Hu, Olivera Kotevska, Siyuan Lu, Weijia Xu, Srinivas Aluru, Chengxiang Zhai, Eyhab Al-Masri, Zhiyuan Chen, Jeff Saltz
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages1503-1512
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728162515
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Dec 2020
Event8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020 - Virtual, Atlanta, United States
Duration: 10 Dec 202013 Dec 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020

Conference

Conference8th IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Atlanta
Period10/12/2013/12/20

Keywords

  • attention mechanism
  • causal inference
  • deep learning

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