Related papers: Offline A/B testing for Recommender Systems

When faced with sequential decision-making problems, it is often useful to be able to predict what would happen if decisions were made using a new policy. Those predictions must often be based on data collected under some previously used…

Counterfactual reasoning from logged data has become increasingly important for many applications such as web advertising or healthcare. In this paper, we address the problem of learning stochastic policies with continuous actions from the…

We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to…

This paper studies the problem of learning interactive recommender systems from logged feedbacks without any exploration in online environments. We address the problem by proposing a general offline reinforcement learning framework for…

We study the efficient off-policy evaluation of natural stochastic policies, which are defined in terms of deviations from the behavior policy. This is a departure from the literature on off-policy evaluation where most work consider the…

Explainable recommendation through counterfactual reasoning seeks to identify the influential aspects of items in recommendations, which can then be used as explanations. However, state-of-the-art approaches, which aim to minimize changes…

Counterfactual inference considers a hypothetical intervention in a parallel world that shares some evidence with the factual world. If the evidence specifies a conditional distribution on a manifold, counterfactuals may be analytically…

In this paper, we examine the biases that arise when firms run A/B tests on continuous parameters to estimate global treatment effects on performance metrics of interest; we particularly focus on price experiments to measure the price…

Evaluation of counterfactual queries (e.g., "If A were true, would C have been true?") is important to fault diagnosis, planning, determination of liability, and policy analysis. We present a method of revaluating counterfactuals when the…

How to sample high quality negative instances from unlabeled data, i.e., negative sampling, is important for training implicit collaborative filtering and contrastive learning models. Although previous studies have proposed some approaches…

Making ideal decisions as a product leader in a web-facing company is extremely difficult. In addition to navigating the ambiguity of customer satisfaction and achieving business goals, one must also pave a path forward for ones' products…

Online experiments are a fundamental component of the development of web-facing products. Given their large user-bases, even small product improvements can have a large impact on user engagement or profits on an absolute scale. As a result,…

Adaptive experimental design methods are increasingly being used in industry as a tool to boost testing throughput or reduce experimentation cost relative to traditional A/B/N testing methods. This paper shares lessons learned regarding the…

Modern decision-making systems, from robots to web recommendation engines, are expected to adapt: to user preferences, changing circumstances or even new tasks. Yet, it is still uncommon to deploy a dynamically learning agent (rather than a…

Two-stage recommender systems first choose a candidate generator and then rank items within the generated set. Because the generator decides which items are available to the ranker, changing the generator changes both the policy value and…

Decision makers often wish to use offline historical data to compare sequential-action policies at various world states. Importantly, computational tools should produce confidence values for such offline policy comparison (OPC) to account…

We introduce the novel approach towards fake text reviews detection in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The existing algorithms concentrate on detecting the fake reviews, generated by language models and ignore the texts,…

Recommender systems influence many of our interactions in the digital world -- impacting how we shop for clothes, sorting what we see when browsing YouTube or TikTok, and determining which restaurants and hotels we are shown when using…

Recommender systems have become increasingly important with the rise of the web as a medium for electronic and business transactions. One of the key drivers of this technology is the ease with which users can provide feedback about their…

Human decision making is well known to be imperfect and the ability to analyse such processes individually is crucial when attempting to aid or improve a decision-maker's ability to perform a task, e.g. to alert them to potential biases or…