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The acronym "CTR" is frequently used in CatBoost https://catboost.ai/docs/concepts/algorithm-main-stages_cat-to-numberic.html to represent a type of value. But I couldn't find what the acronym stands for. Could you please spell out the non acronym form, and provide some references to its definition?

jaky
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2 Answers2

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Ctr is an acronym of click-through rate. They encode categorically features using this metric to get better results. It is quite similar to mean encoding.

I didn't get any online resource for reference.

Jeeva S
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    That's weird. Spelling out one of the equations in doc "Click through rate_[i] = (countInClass + prior) / (totalCount + 1)" doesn't make sense to me. – jaky Jul 16 '20 at 16:20
  • Yeah, but I am pretty sure it's some form of encoding as, at the end of the documentation, they called the same formula as avg_target. – Jeeva S Jul 16 '20 at 17:48
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Click Through Rate which is commonly used in advertisement industry. CatBoost was created by Yandex which makes all the profits in ads so I am not surprised they used CTR metric as an example all over documentation.

Tagar
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    Could you please clarify what does click through rate have anything to do with transforming categorical feature to numerical feature? I felt like it's "categorical to response" or "categorical to real number", but can not be sure about it. – jaky Jul 16 '20 at 16:01
  • if I understand it right, it's a form of target encoding. but yes they could have chose a more generic name for that feature. – Tagar Jul 16 '20 at 16:35