TIM: Temporal Interaction Model in Notification System

TL;DR

This paper introduces TIM, a model that predicts optimal notification timing by analyzing user behavior patterns over time, significantly improving engagement in mobile apps without increasing disturbance.

Contribution

TIM is the first model to incorporate long-term user behavior patterns and holistic notification timing optimization in notification systems.

Findings

TIM improves user engagement significantly in offline and online tests.

TIM accurately forecasts user behavior with high reliability.

Holistic notification timing reduces user disturbance while enhancing engagement.

Abstract

Modern mobile applications heavily rely on the notification system to acquire daily active users and enhance user engagement. Being able to proactively reach users, the system has to decide when to send notifications to users. Although many researchers have studied optimizing the timing of sending notifications, they only utilized users' contextual features, without modeling users' behavior patterns. Additionally, these efforts only focus on individual notifications, and there is a lack of studies on optimizing the holistic timing of multiple notifications within a period. To bridge these gaps, we propose the Temporal Interaction Model (TIM), which models users' behavior patterns by estimating CTR in every time slot over a day in our short video application Kuaishou. TIM leverages long-term user historical interaction sequence features such as notification receipts, clicks, watch time and effective views, and employs a temporal attention unit (TAU) to extract user behavior patterns. Moreover, we provide an elegant strategy of holistic notifications send time control to improve user engagement while minimizing disruption. We evaluate the effectiveness of TIM through offline experiments and online A/B tests. The results indicate that TIM is a reliable tool for forecasting user behavior, leading to a remarkable enhancement in user engagement without causing undue disturbance.