Related papers: Offline A/B testing for Recommender Systems
Recommender system practitioners are facing increasing pressure to explain recommendations. We explore how to explain recommendations using counterfactual logic, i.e. "Had you not interacted with the following items, we would not recommend…
Learning to Rank (LTR) from user interactions is challenging as user feedback often contains high levels of bias and noise. At the moment, two methodologies for dealing with bias prevail in the field of LTR: counterfactual methods that…
Recommender systems are gaining increasing and critical impacts on human and society since a growing number of users use them for information seeking and decision making. Therefore, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems…
We study counterfactual regression, which aims to map input features to outcomes under hypothetical scenarios that differ from those observed in the data. This is particularly useful for decision-making when adapting to sudden shifts in…
Off-policy learning, referring to the procedure of policy optimization with access only to logged feedback data, has shown importance in various real-world applications, such as search engines, recommender systems, and etc. While the…
Evaluation of policies in recommender systems typically involves A/B testing using live experiments on real users to assess a new policy's impact on relevant metrics. This ``gold standard'' comes at a high cost, however, in terms of cycle…
Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is critical for applying contextual bandit algorithms to high-stakes decision-making settings such as healthcare, where new treatment policies must be evaluated prior to deployment. Unfortunately, OPE techniques…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
Recommender systems have generated tremendous value for both users and businesses, drawing significant attention from academia and industry alike. However, due to practical constraints, academic research remains largely confined to offline…
In many domains, the exploration process of reinforcement learning will be too costly as it requires trying out suboptimal policies, resulting in a need for off-policy evaluation, in which a target policy is evaluated based on data…
In Recommender System (RS), explanations help users understand why items are recommended and can enhance a system's transparency, persuasiveness, engagement, and trust, which are known as explanation goals. However, evaluating the…
With a vast number of items, web-pages, and news to choose from, online services and the customers both benefit tremendously from personalized recommender systems. Such systems however provide great opportunities for targeted…
Off-policy Evaluation (OPE), or offline evaluation in general, evaluates the performance of hypothetical policies leveraging only offline log data. It is particularly useful in applications where the online interaction involves high stakes…
Online recommender systems often deal with continuous, potentially fast and unbounded flows of data. Ensemble methods for recommender systems have been used in the past in batch algorithms, however they have never been studied with…
A/B testing, or online experiment is a standard business strategy to compare a new product with an old one in pharmaceutical, technological, and traditional industries. Major challenges arise in online experiments of two-sided marketplace…
By providing explanations for users and system designers to facilitate better understanding and decision making, explainable recommendation has been an important research problem. In this paper, we propose Counterfactual Explainable…
Abstaining classifiers have the option to abstain from making predictions on inputs that they are unsure about. These classifiers are becoming increasingly popular in high-stakes decision-making problems, as they can withhold uncertain…
We present and prove properties of a new offline policy evaluator for an exploration learning setting which is superior to previous evaluators. In particular, it simultaneously and correctly incorporates techniques from importance…
As counterfactual examples become increasingly popular for explaining decisions of deep learning models, it is essential to understand what properties quantitative evaluation metrics do capture and equally important what they do not…
Uplift modeling estimates the causal effect of an intervention as the difference between potential outcomes under treatment and control, whereas counterfactual identification aims to recover the joint distribution of these potential…