English

CDR: Conservative Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Recommendation

Information Retrieval 2023-08-21 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems. Recently, Doubly Robust Learning (DR) has gained significant attention due to its remarkable performance and robust properties. However, our experimental findings indicate that existing DR methods are severely impacted by the presence of so-called Poisonous Imputation, where the imputation significantly deviates from the truth and becomes counterproductive. To address this issue, this work proposes Conservative Doubly Robust strategy (CDR) which filters imputations by scrutinizing their mean and variance. Theoretical analyses show that CDR offers reduced variance and improved tail bounds.In addition, our experimental investigations illustrate that CDR significantly enhances performance and can indeed reduce the frequency of poisonous imputation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.08461,
  title  = {CDR: Conservative Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Recommendation},
  author = {ZiJie Song and JiaWei Chen and Sheng Zhou and QiHao Shi and Yan Feng and Chun Chen and Can Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.08461},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:57:11.126Z