Related papers: Online Evaluation Methods for the Causal Effect of…

Randomized experiments in which the treatment of a unit can affect the outcomes of other units are becoming increasingly common in healthcare, economics, and in the social and information sciences. From a causal inference perspective, the…

Recommender systems are widely used AI applications designed to help users efficiently discover relevant items. The effectiveness of such systems is tied to the satisfaction of both users and providers. However, user satisfaction is complex…

A fundamental question for companies with large amount of logged data is: How to use such logged data together with incoming streaming data to make good decisions? Many companies currently make decisions via online A/B tests, but wrong…

Randomized experiments, or A/B tests are used to estimate the causal impact of a feature on the behavior of users by creating two parallel universes in which members are simultaneously assigned to treatment and control. However, in social…

Recommending the best course of action for an individual is a major application of individual-level causal effect estimation. This application is often needed in safety-critical domains such as healthcare, where estimating and communicating…

Multileaved comparison methods generalize interleaved comparison methods to provide a scalable approach for comparing ranking systems based on regular user interactions. Such methods enable the increasingly rapid research and development of…

The real-world testing of decisions made using causal machine learning models is an essential prerequisite for their successful application. We focus on evaluating and improving contextual treatment assignment decisions: these are…

Consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of some attribute of a text document; for example: what effect does writing a polite vs. rude email have on response time? To estimate a causal effect from observational data, we need to…

This paper deals with the problem of evaluating the causal effect using observational data in the presence of an unobserved exposure/ outcome variable, when cause-effect relationships between variables can be described as a directed acyclic…

Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…

Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…

Online advertising has been the major monetization approach for Internet companies. Advertisers invest budgets to bid for real-time impressions to gain direct and indirect returns. Existing works have been concentrating on optimizing direct…

As online reviews increasingly drive consumer decisions, the impact of review interface design on rating authenticity remains under-explored. This research investigates how evaluation sequence ("Rating-First" vs. "Review-First") influences…

Optimizing an interactive system against a predefined online metric is particularly challenging, when the metric is computed from user feedback such as clicks and payments. The key challenge is the counterfactual nature: in the case of Web…

E-commerce businesses employ recommender models to assist in identifying a personalized set of products for each visitor. To accurately assess the recommendations' influence on customer clicks and buys, three target areas -- customer…

Experimentation is widely utilized for causal inference and data-driven decision-making across disciplines. In an A/B experiment, for example, an online business randomizes two different treatments (e.g., website designs) to their customers…

Experimental testing is vital in the optimization of web applications, and as such A/B testing has been widely adopted as a methodology for determining optimal content for many web applications. While some testing platforms provide…

In causal inference, interference occurs when the treatment of one unit may affect the outcomes of other units. The goal of this work is to serve as a guide to the use of linear outcome modeling for estimating causal effects in settings…

The field of generating recommendations within the framework of causal inference has seen a recent surge, with recommendations being likened to treatments. This approach enhances insights into the influence of recommendations on user…

Though it has been recognized that recommending serendipitous (i.e., surprising and relevant) items can be helpful for increasing users' satisfaction and behavioral intention, how to measure serendipity in the offline environment is still…