CT-ER: Detecting Click Fraud in Pay-Per-Click Streams of Online Advertising Networks

随着互联网的迅速发展，网络广告在广告市场中扮演着越来越重要的角色，并已成为一项价值10亿美元的业务（2007年为195亿美元）。目前广泛使用的在线广告收入模式之一是点击付费（PPC），它涉及根据关键字的受欢迎程度和竞争广告商的数量对每次点击收费。然而，点击付费模式为个人或竞争对手公司产生虚假点击留下了空间（即，点击欺诈），因为PPC请求中缺乏可验证的参与。据报道，在网络广告市场中，有14.6%的广告被支付给了点击欺诈，这已经损害了网络广告的发展和健康。该项目是（1）开发一个全新的框架，用于可验证的点击和定义点击质量的新方法;以及（2）开发基于过滤的工具，用于验证和清除可疑点击，每个工具都提供对误报率和误报率的量化保证，同时涉及合理的处理开销和空间要求。新的框架促进了广告商和在线广告业务之间的透明度和信任，并消除了保持？点击过滤器？作为商业机密 还正在编制一套便携式教材，以便利在本科生和研究生课程中教授已开发的技术。其中一些结果计划被授权给在线广告公司使用。

With the rapid growth of the Internet, online advertisement plays a more and more important role in the advertising market and has become a billion-dollar business ($19.5 billon in 2007). One of the current and widely used revenue models for online advertising is Pay-per-click (PPC), which involves charging for each click based on the popularity of keywords and the number of competing advertisers. However, the pay-per-click model leaves room for individuals or rival companies to generate false clicks (i.e., click fraud) due to the lack of verifiable engagement in PPC requests. It has been reported that in online ad market, 14.6% are paid to Click Fraud, which has damaged the development and healthiness of online advertising. This project is (1) developing a fundamentally new framework for verifiable clicks and a new way of defining the quality of clicks; and (2) developing filtering-based tools for validating and weeding out suspicious clicks, each of which provides quantifiable guarantees on false positive and negative rates while involving a reasonable processing overhead and space requirements. The new framework promotes transparency and trust between advertisers and online ad businesses and eliminates the need for keeping ?click filters? as trade secrets. A set of portable course materials is also being developed to facilitate the teaching of developed techniques in undergraduate and graduate courses. Some of these results are planned to be licensed for use by online ad businesses.