Methods for predicting the click-through rates of Internet advertisements
placed into web pages are disclosed. Specifically, a click-through rate
prediction is generating using a hybrid system with two terms. The first
term is constructed using a machine learning model that incorporates a
limited number of important factors. The second term is constructed using
a look-up table that is built using a complex statistical analysis of
various web page and advertisement combinations. To construct the second
term, the field of multi-level hierarchical modeling is used.
Specifically, a tree-structured Markov model is used to process the
training data and construct the adjustment factor look-up table. To
reduce the complexity of the statistical analysis, Kalman-filters are
used to estimate parameters in the traditional multi-level hierarchical
models for scalability.