Metrics

Let's look at the online and offline metrics used to judge the performance of an ad's prediction system.

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The metrics used in our ad prediction system will help select the best machine-learned models to show relevant ads to the user. They should also ensure that these models help the overall improvement of the platform, increase revenue, and provide value for the advertisers.

Like any other optimization problem, there are two types of metrics to measure the effectiveness of our ad prediction system:

  1. Offline metrics
  2. Online metrics

đź“ť Why are both online and offline metrics important?

Offline metrics are mainly used to compare the models offline quickly and see which one gives the best result. Online metrics are used to validate the model for an end-to-end system to see how the revenue and engagement rate improve before making the final decision to launch the model.

Offline metrics

As we build models, the best way to compare them is to measure prediction accuracy instead of measuring revenue impact directly. The following are a few metrics that enable us to compare the two models better offline.

Log Loss

Let’s first go over the area under the receiver operator curve (AUC), which is a commonly used metric for model comparison in binary classification tasks. However, given that the system needs well-calibrated prediction scores, AUC, has the following shortcomings in this ad prediction scenario.

  1. AUC does not penalize for “how far off” predicted score is from the actual label. For example, let’s take two positive examples (i.e., with actual label 1) that have the predicted scores of 0.51 and 0.7 at threshold 0.5. These scores will contribute equally to our loss even though one is much closer to our predicted value.

  2. AUC is insensitive to well-calibrated probabilities.

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