Related papers: Offline A/B testing for Recommender Systems
Recommender systems research tends to evaluate model performance offline and on randomly sampled targets, yet the same systems are later used to predict user behavior sequentially from a fixed point in time. Simulating online recommender…
Counterfactual learning is a natural scenario to improve web-based machine translation services by offline learning from feedback logged during user interactions. In order to avoid the risk of showing inferior translations to users, in such…
Evaluating and optimizing policies in the presence of unobserved confounders is a problem of growing interest in offline reinforcement learning. Using conventional methods for offline RL in the presence of confounding can not only lead to…
In this paper, we argue that the paradigm commonly adopted for offline evaluation of sequential recommender systems is unsuitable for evaluating reinforcement learning-based recommenders. We find that most of the existing offline evaluation…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately evaluate the performance of counterfactual policies using only offline logged data. Although many estimators have been developed, there is no single estimator that dominates the others, because…
Offline policy evaluation (OPE) allows us to evaluate and estimate a new sequential decision-making policy's performance by leveraging historical interaction data collected from other policies. Evaluating a new policy online without a…
Online controlled experiments, or A/B tests, are large-scale randomized trials in digital environments. This paper investigates the estimands of the difference-in-means estimator in these experiments, focusing on scenarios with repeated…
For industrial learning-to-rank (LTR) systems, it is common that the output of a ranking model is modified, either as a results of post-processing logic that enforces business requirements, or as a result of unforeseen design flaws or bugs…
Randomized trials, also known as A/B tests, are used to select between two policies: a control and a treatment. Given a corresponding set of features, we can ideally learn an optimized policy P that maps the A/B test data features to action…
The ability to perform effective off-policy learning would revolutionize the process of building better interactive systems, such as search engines and recommendation systems for e-commerce, computational advertising and news. Recent…
Off-policy evaluation methods are important in recommendation systems and search engines, where data collected under an existing logging policy is used to estimate the performance of a new proposed policy. A common approach to this problem…
Off-policy estimation (OPE) methods enable unbiased offline evaluation of recommender systems, directly estimating the online reward some target policy would have obtained, from offline data and with statistical guarantees. The theoretical…
Online advertisements have become one of today's most widely used tools for enhancing businesses partly because of their compatibility with A/B testing. A/B testing allows sellers to find effective advertisement strategies such as ad…
Online experiments in internet systems, also known as A/B tests, are used for a wide range of system tuning problems, such as optimizing recommender system ranking policies and learning adaptive streaming controllers. Decision-makers…
We develop a generic data-driven method for estimator selection in off-policy policy evaluation settings. We establish a strong performance guarantee for the method, showing that it is competitive with the oracle estimator, up to a constant…
The off-policy paradigm casts recommendation as a counterfactual decision-making task, allowing practitioners to unbiasedly estimate online metrics using offline data. This leads to effective evaluation metrics, as well as learning…
A critical challenge in recommender systems is to establish reliable relationships between offline and online metrics that predict real-world performance. Motivated by recent advances in Pareto front approximation, we introduce a pragmatic…
Decision support systems for classification tasks are predominantly designed to predict the value of the ground truth labels. However, since their predictions are not perfect, these systems also need to make human experts understand when…
Recommender systems are central to modern online platforms, but a popular concern is that they may be pulling society in dangerous directions (e.g., towards filter bubbles). However, a challenge with measuring the effects of recommender…
Recommender systems operate in an inherently dynamical setting. Past recommendations influence future behavior, including which data points are observed and how user preferences change. However, experimenting in production systems with real…