Related papers: Online Evaluation Methods for the Causal Effect of…
Causal inference has recently garnered significant interest among recommender system (RS) researchers due to its ability to dissect cause-and-effect relationships and its broad applicability across multiple fields. It offers a framework to…
Learning to rank is an important problem in machine learning and recommender systems. In a recommender system, a user is typically recommended a list of items. Since the user is unlikely to examine the entire recommended list, partial…
Multimodal recommender systems enhance personalized recommendations in e-commerce and online advertising by integrating visual, textual, and user-item interaction data. However, existing methods often overlook two critical biases: (i) modal…
Online experimentation, also known as A/B testing, is the gold standard for measuring product impacts and making business decisions in the tech industry. The validity and utility of experiments, however, hinge on unbiasedness and sufficient…
Top-N recommendation, which aims to learn user ranking-based preference, has long been a fundamental problem in a wide range of applications. Traditional models usually motivate themselves by designing complex or tailored architectures…
Recommender Systems have become an integral part of online e-Commerce platforms, driving customer engagement and revenue. Most popular recommender systems attempt to learn from users' past engagement data to understand behavioral traits of…
The goal of causal inference is to understand the outcome of alternative courses of action. However, all causal inference requires assumptions. Such assumptions can be more influential than in typical tasks for probabilistic modeling, and…
Causal inference analysis is the estimation of the effects of actions on outcomes. In the context of healthcare data this means estimating the outcome of counter-factual treatments (i.e. including treatments that were not observed) on a…
In the era of information overload, recommender systems (RSs) have become an indispensable part of online service platforms. Traditional RSs estimate user interests and predict their future behaviors by utilizing correlations in the…
Practitioners making decisions based on causal effects typically ignore structural uncertainty. We analyze when this uncertainty is consequential enough to warrant methodological solutions (Bayesian model averaging over competing causal…
A predictive model makes outcome predictions based on some given features, i.e., it estimates the conditional probability of the outcome given a feature vector. In general, a predictive model cannot estimate the causal effect of a feature…
To make effective decisions, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the causal relationships among actions, environments, and outcomes. This review aims to surface three crucial aspects of decision-making through a causal lens:…
This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of *interference* between…
It is common in the internet industry to use offline-developed algorithms to power online products that contribute to the success of a business. Offline-developed algorithms are guided by offline evaluation metrics, which are often…
It is common to evaluate a set of items by soliciting people to rate them. For example, universities ask students to rate the teaching quality of their instructors, and conference organizers ask authors of submissions to evaluate the…
Evaluating retrieval-ranking systems is crucial for developing high-performing models. While online A/B testing is the gold standard, its high cost and risks to user experience require effective offline methods. However, relying on…
Recommender systems research tends to evaluate model performance offline and on randomly sampled targets, yet the same systems are later used to predict user behavior sequentially from a fixed point in time. Simulating online recommender…
Estimation of causal effects is the core objective of many scientific disciplines. However, it remains a challenging task, especially when the effects are estimated from observational data. Recently, several promising machine learning…
Causal mediation analysis seeks to determine whether an independent variable affects a response variable directly or whether it does so indirectly, by way of a mediator. The existing statistical tests to determine the existence of an…
Every design choice will have different effects on different units. However traditional A/B tests are often underpowered to identify these heterogeneous effects. This is especially true when the set of unit-level attributes is…