Many video websites offer packages composed of paid videos. Users who purchase a package become members of the website, and thus can enjoy the membership service, such as watching the paid videos. It is practically important to predict which users will become members so that the website can recommend them the suitable packages for purchasing. Existing works generally predict the purchase behavior of users through capturing their interests in items. However, such works cannot be directly applied to the studied problem due to the following challenges. First, some important features of videos and packages change over time, such as the number of clicks and the update of the videos. Existing methods are not capable to capture such dynamic features. Second, a user's purchasing intention is very hard to capture. A user watching a video does not necessarily mean that he/she would like to purchase the corresponding package. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Evolution based Deep Hierarchical Intention Network (Dy-HIEN for short) for membership prediction, which contains two modules. In the first module, we design a dynamic embedding learning method, applying multi-relational heterogeneous information network and attention mechanism to effectively represent the embedding of videos and packages. In the second module, a hierarchical method is proposed to extract the purchase intention of users. First, the video play history is divided into sessions based on the clicks on packages, and then time-order encoder and kernel functions are applied to mine the intention pattern associated with the package clicked in each session. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets are conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model on a variety of evaluation metrics.

We propose an embedded/integrated feature selection method based on neural networks with Group Lasso penalty. Group Lasso regularization is considered to produce sparsity on the inputs to the network, i.e., for selection of useful features. Lasso based feature selection using a multi-layer perceptron usually requires an additional set of weights, while our Group Lasso formulation does not require that. However, Group Lasso penalty is non-differentiable at the origin. This may lead to oscillations in numerical simulations and make it difficult to analyze theoretically. To address this issue, four smoothing Group Lasso penalties are introduced. A rigorous proof for the convergence of the proposed algorithm is presented under suitable assumptions. To verify the effectiveness, a three-step algorithmic architecture is adopted in implementation. Experimental results on several datasets validate the theoretical results and demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method.