Related papers: Designing Experiments to Measure Incrementality on…
This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…
Understanding true influence in social media requires distinguishing correlation from causation--particularly when analyzing misinformation spread. While existing approaches focus on exposure metrics and network structures, they often fail…
Evaluating the causal effect of recommendations is an important objective because the causal effect on user interactions can directly leads to an increase in sales and user engagement. To select an optimal recommendation model, it is common…
Online social networks have transformed the ways in which political mobilization messages are disseminated, raising new questions about how peer influence operates at scale. Building on the landmark 61-million-person Facebook experiment…
This study examines Facebook and YouTube content from over a thousand news outlets in four European languages from 2018 to 2023, using a Bayesian structural time-series model to evaluate the impact of viral posts. Our results show that most…
Public health interventions are a fundamental tool for mitigating the spread of an infectious disease. However, it is not always possible to obtain a conclusive estimate for the impact of an intervention, especially in situations where the…
Relevance evaluation plays a crucial role in personalized search systems to ensure that search results align with a user's queries and intent. While human annotation is the traditional method for relevance evaluation, its high cost and long…
We introduce AugLy, a data augmentation library with a focus on adversarial robustness. AugLy provides a wide array of augmentations for multiple modalities (audio, image, text, & video). These augmentations were inspired by those that real…
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,…
Social advertising uses information about consumers' peers, including peer affiliations with a brand, product, organization, etc., to target ads and contextualize their display. This approach can increase ad efficacy for two main reasons:…
Social networking and micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, play an important role in sharing digital information. Despite the popularity and usefulness of social media, there have been many instances where corrupted users found ways to…
Causally identifying the effect of digital advertising is challenging, because experimentation is expensive, and observational data lacks random variation. This paper identifies a pervasive source of naturally occurring, quasi-experimental…
Social Networks allow users to self-present by sharing personal contents with others which may add comments. Recent studies highlighted how the emotions expressed in a post affect others' posts, eliciting a congruent emotion. So far, no…
Lack of reliability is a well-known issue for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. This problem has gained increasing attention in recent years, and efforts to improve it have grown substantially. To aid RL researchers and production…
Online marketing is critical for many industrial platforms and business applications, aiming to increase user engagement and platform revenue by identifying corresponding delivery-sensitive groups for specific incentives, such as coupons…
Social media has become something that is important to enhance social networking and sharing of information through the website. Social media have not only changed social networking, they provide a valuable tool for social organization,…
In recent years, new indicators known as altmetrics have been introduced to measure the impact of scientific activity. These indicators are obtained through the mentions realised from different social media, existing several aggregators of…
Most recommendation engines today are based on predicting user engagement, e.g. predicting whether a user will click on an item or not. However, there is potentially a large gap between engagement signals and a desired notion of "value"…
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…
A well-known problem when learning from user clicks are inherent biases prevalent in the data, such as position or trust bias. Click models are a common method for extracting information from user clicks, such as document relevance in web…