BASM: A Bottom-up Adaptive Spatiotemporal Model for Online Food Ordering Service

Online Food Ordering Service (OFOS) is a popular location-based service that helps people order what they want. Compared with traditional e-commerce recommendation systems, users’ interests may be diverse under different spatiotemporal contexts, leading to various spatiotemporal data distributions, which increases the difficulty of model learning. However, numerous current works simply mix all samples to train a set of model parameters, which makes it challenging to capture the diversity in different spatiotemporal contexts. Therefore, we address this challenge by proposing a Bottom-up Adaptive Spatiotemporal Model(BASM) to adaptively fit the spatiotemporal data distribution, further improving the fitting capability of the model. Specifically, a spatiotemporal-aware embedding layer performs weight adaptation on field granularity in feature embedding to achieve the purpose of dynamically perceiving spatiotemporal contexts. Meanwhile, we propose a spatiotemporal semantic transformation layer to explicitly convert the concatenated input of the raw semantic to the spatiotemporal semantic, which can further enhance the semantic representation under different spatiotemporal contexts. Furthermore, we introduce a novel spatiotemporal adaptive bias tower to capture diverse spatiotemporal bias, reducing the difficulty of modeling spatiotemporal distinction. To further verify the effectiveness of BASM, we propose two new metrics, Time-period-wise AUC (TAUC) and City-wise AUC (CAUC). Extensive offline evaluations on public and industrial datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model. The online A/B experiment also further illustrates the practicability of the model online service. This proposed method has now been implemented on Ele.me, a major online food ordering platform in China, serving more than 100 million online users.