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Related papers: Offline A/B testing for Recommender Systems

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The widespread adoption of online randomized controlled experiments (A/B Tests) for decision-making has created ongoing capacity constraints which necessitate interim analyses. As a consequence, platform users are increasingly motivated to…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-11 Abbas Zaidi , Rina Friedberg , Samir Khan , Yao-Yang Leow , Maulik Soneji , Houssam Nassif , Richard Mudd

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in helping users navigate an overwhelming selection of products and services. On online platforms, users have the opportunity to share feedback in various modes, including numerical ratings, textual…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Emrul Hasan , Mizanur Rahman , Chen Ding , Jimmy Xiangji Huang , Shaina Raza

We predict credit applications with off-the-shelf, interchangeable black-box classifiers and we explain single predictions with counterfactual explanations. Counterfactual explanations expose the minimal changes required on the input data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-19 Rory Mc Grath , Luca Costabello , Chan Le Van , Paul Sweeney , Farbod Kamiab , Zhao Shen , Freddy Lecue

Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) aims to estimate the value of a target policy using offline data collected from potentially different policies. In real-world applications, however, logged data often suffers from missingness. While OPE has been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-10 Han Wang , Yang Xu , Wenbin Lu , Rui Song

Off-Policy reinforcement learning has been a driving force for the state-of-the-art conversational AIs leading to more natural humanagent interactions and improving the user satisfaction for goal-oriented agents. However, in large-scale…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Sarthak Ahuja , Mohammad Kachuee , Fateme Sheikholeslami , Weiqing Liu , Jaeyoung Do

Recommender systems are a vital tool that helps us to overcome the information overload problem. They are being used by most e-commerce web sites and attract the interest of a broad scientific community. A recommender system uses data on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-02-22 Fei Yu , An Zeng , Sebastien Gillard , Matus Medo

People in the Internet era have to cope with the information overload, striving to find what they are interested in, and usually face this situation by following a limited number of sources or friends that best match their interests. A…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-03-26 Duanbing Chen , An Zeng , Giulio Cimini , Yi-Cheng Zhang

While methods for measuring and correcting differential performance in risk prediction models have proliferated in recent years, most existing techniques can only be used to assess fairness across relatively large subgroups. The purpose of…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-01-30 Solvejg Wastvedt , Jared D Huling , Julian Wolfson

Off-policy evaluation estimates how a target policy would perform using data collected by a different behavior policy, which is crucial when online testing is costly or risky, such as in recommendation or healthcare. Standard importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ziwen Xie , Shaowen Xiang , Hongyu He , Dianbo Liu

Counterfactuals are central in causal human reasoning and the scientific discovery process. The uplift, also called conditional average treatment effect, measures the causal effect of some action, or treatment, on the outcome of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Théo Verhelst , Denis Mercier , Jeevan Shrestha , Gianluca Bontempi

Counterfactual evaluation of novel treatment assignment functions (e.g., advertising algorithms and recommender systems) is one of the most crucial causal inference problems for practitioners. Traditionally, randomized controlled trials…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Ruocheng Guo , Jundong Li , Huan Liu

Developing accurate off-policy estimators is crucial for both evaluating and optimizing for new policies. The main challenge in off-policy estimation is the distribution shift between the logging policy that generates data and the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Noveen Sachdeva , Lequn Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Julian McAuley

We study estimator selection and hyper-parameter tuning in off-policy evaluation. Although cross-validation is the most popular method for model selection in supervised learning, off-policy evaluation relies mostly on theory, which provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Matej Cief , Branislav Kveton , Michal Kompan

Recommender systems predict what items a user will interact with next, based on their past interactions. The problem is often approached through supervised learning, but recent advancements have shifted towards policy optimization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Dawen Liang , Nikos Vlassis

This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-11 Onur Atan , William R. Zame , Qiaojun Feng , Mihaela van der Schaar

The effectiveness of clarification question models in engaging users within search systems is currently constrained, casting doubt on their overall usefulness. To improve the performance of these models, it is crucial to employ assessment…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Leila Tavakoli , Johanne R. Trippas , Hamed Zamani , Falk Scholer , Mark Sanderson

Technology firms conduct randomized controlled experiments ("A/B tests") to learn which actions to take to improve business outcomes. In firms with mature experimentation platforms, experimentation programs can consist of many thousands of…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-30 Winston Chou , Colin Gray , Nathan Kallus , Aurélien Bibaut , Simon Ejdemyr

Counterfactual evaluation can estimate Click-Through-Rate (CTR) differences between ranking systems based on historical interaction data, while mitigating the effect of position bias and item-selection bias. We introduce the novel…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-07-29 Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

Personalized recommendations have become a common feature of modern online services, including most major e-commerce sites, media platforms and social networks. Today, due to their high practical relevance, research in the area of…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Pablo Castells , Dietmar Jannach

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li