Related papers: Online Evaluation Methods for the Causal Effect of…
Causal probing aims to analyze foundation models by examining how intervening on their representation of various latent properties impacts their outputs. Recent works have cast doubt on the theoretical basis of several leading causal…
When interpreting A/B tests, we typically focus only on the statistically significant results and take them by face value. This practice, termed post-selection inference in the statistical literature, may negatively affect both point…
The propensity score is a common tool for estimating the causal effect of a binary treatment in observational data. In this setting, matching, subclassification, imputation, or inverse probability weighting on the propensity score can…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
When making treatment selection decisions, it is essential to include a causal effect estimation analysis to compare potential outcomes under different treatments or controls, assisting in optimal selection. However, merely estimating…
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such,…
The impacts of link recommendations on social networks are challenging to evaluate, and so far they have been studied in limited settings. Observational studies are restricted in the kinds of causal questions they can answer and naive A/B…
Recommender systems play a key role in shaping modern web ecosystems. These systems alternate between (1) making recommendations (2) collecting user responses to these recommendations, and (3) retraining the recommendation algorithm based…
Bipartite experiments are a recent object of study in causal inference, whereby treatment is applied to one set of units and outcomes of interest are measured on a different set of units. These experiments are particularly useful in…
Online experiments such as Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) or A/B-tests are the bread and butter of modern platforms on the web. They are conducted continuously to allow platforms to estimate the causal effect of replacing system…
Online platforms regularly conduct randomized experiments to understand how changes to the platform causally affect various outcomes of interest. However, experimentation on online platforms has been criticized for having, among other…
Evaluating the causal effect of an intervention on multivariate outcomes is challenging when the outcomes are interdependent and derived rather than directly observed. Effective connectivity, which summarizes the directional neural…
How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…
To improve user experience and profits of corporations, modern industrial recommender systems usually aim to select the items that are most likely to be interacted with (e.g., clicks and purchases). However, they overlook the fact that…
Both in academic and industry-based research, online evaluation methods are seen as the golden standard for interactive applications like recommendation systems. Naturally, the reason for this is that we can directly measure utility metrics…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and causal modelling naturally complement each other. The goal of causal modelling is to predict the effects of interventions in an environment, while the goal of reinforcement learning is to select interventions…
Tech companies (e.g., Google or Facebook) often use randomized online experiments and/or A/B testing primarily based on the average treatment effects to compare their new product with an old one. However, it is also critically important to…
Recommender systems widely use implicit feedback such as click data because of its general availability. Although the presence of clicks signals the users' preference to some extent, the lack of such clicks does not necessarily indicate a…
Applied researchers in biomedicine and related fields are often interested in estimating the causal effect of a treatment or intervention. Although randomized clinical trials are considered the gold standard for establishing causal effects,…
It is standard practice in online retail to run pricing experiments by randomizing at the article-level, i.e. by changing prices of different products to identify treatment effects. Due to customers' cross-price substitution behavior, such…