# Driving Engagement in Daily Fantasy Sports with a Scalable and Urgency-Aware Ranking Engine

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13796/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09781/) (2018)
- [Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06939/) (2015)
- [Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06978/) (2017)
- [Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05889/) (2017)
- [Stochastic Optimization of Sorting Networks via Continuous Relaxations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08850/) (2019)
- [Modeling the Heterogeneous Duration of User Interest in Time-Dependent Recommendation: A Hidden Semi-Markov Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11127/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In daily fantasy sports (DFS), match participation is highly time-sensitive. Users must act within a narrow window before a game begins, making match recommendation a time-critical task to prevent missed engagement and revenue loss. Existing recommender systems, typically designed for static item catalogs, are ill-equipped to handle the hard temporal deadlines inherent in these live events. To address this, we designed and deployed a recommendation engine using the Deep Interest Network (DIN) architecture. We adapt the DIN architecture by injecting temporality at two levels: first, through real-time urgency features for each candidate match (e.g., time-to-round-lock), and second, via temporal positional encodings that represent the time-gap between each historical interaction and the current recommendation request, allowing the model to dynamically weigh the recency of past actions. This approach, combined with a listwise neuralNDCG loss function, produces highly relevant and urgency-aware rankings. To support this at industrial scale, we developed a multi-node, multi-GPU training architecture on Ray and PyTorch. Our system, validated on a massive industrial dataset with over 650k users and over 100B interactions, achieves a +9% lift in nDCG@1 over a heavily optimized LightGBM baseline with handcrafted features. The strong offline performance of this model establishes its viability as a core component for our planned on-device (edge) recommendation system, where on-line A/B testing will be conducted.