  Generalized linear models with nonlinear feature transformations are widely
used for large-scale regression and classification problems with sparse inputs.
Memorization of feature interactions through a wide set of cross-product
feature transformations are effective and interpretable, while generalization
requires more feature engineering effort. With less feature engineering, deep
neural networks can generalize better to unseen feature combinations through
low-dimensional dense embeddings learned for the sparse features. However, deep
neural networks with embeddings can over-generalize and recommend less relevant
items when the user-item interactions are sparse and high-rank. In this paper,
we present Wide & Deep learning---jointly trained wide linear models and deep
neural networks---to combine the benefits of memorization and generalization
for recommender systems. We productionized and evaluated the system on Google
Play, a commercial mobile app store with over one billion active users and over
one million apps. Online experiment results show that Wide & Deep significantly
increased app acquisitions compared with wide-only and deep-only models. We
have also open-sourced our implementation in TensorFlow.
