Related papers: Causal Estimation of User Learning in Personalized…

A growing number of researchers are conducting randomized experiments to analyze causal relationships in network settings where units influence one another. A dominant methodology for analyzing these experiments is design-based, leveraging…

Scientists have been interested in estimating causal peer effects to understand how people's behaviors are affected by their network peers. However, it is well known that identification and estimation of causal peer effects are challenging…

Unlike classical causal inference, which often has an average causal effect of a treatment within a population as a target, in settings such as personalized medicine, the goal is to map a given unit's characteristics to a treatment tailored…

Using offline datasets to evaluate conversational agents often fails to cover rare scenarios or to support testing new policies. This has motivated the use of controllable user simulators for targeted, counterfactual evaluation, typically…

In high-stakes domains like healthcare, users often expect that sharing personal information with machine learning systems will yield tangible benefits, such as more accurate diagnoses and clearer explanations of contributing factors.…

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…

E-commerce companies have a number of online products, such as organic search, sponsored search, and recommendation modules, to fulfill customer needs. Although each of these products provides a unique opportunity for users to interact with…

Deciding on an appropriate intervention requires a causal model of a treatment, the outcome, and potential mediators. Causal mediation analysis lets us distinguish between direct and indirect effects of the intervention, but has mostly been…

Large observational data are increasingly available in disciplines such as health, economic and social sciences, where researchers are interested in causal questions rather than prediction. In this paper, we examine the problem of…

Researchers commonly use difference-in-differences (DiD) designs to evaluate public policy interventions. While methods exist for estimating effects in the context of binary interventions, policies often result in varied exposures across…

In many fields of scientific research and real-world applications, unbiased estimation of causal effects from non-experimental data is crucial for understanding the mechanism underlying the data and for decision-making on effective…

This paper shows how to use a randomized saturation experimental design to identify and estimate causal effects in the presence of spillovers--one person's treatment may affect another's outcome--and one-sided non-compliance--subjects can…

Evaluating different training interventions to determine which produce the best learning outcomes is one of the main challenges faced by instructional designers. Typically, these designers use A/B experiments to evaluate each intervention;…

Online reviews enable consumers to engage with companies and provide important feedback. Due to the complexity of the high-dimensional text, these reviews are often simplified as a single numerical score, e.g., ratings or sentiment scores.…

We develop a Causal-Deep Neural Network (CDNN) model trained in two stages to infer causal impact estimates at an individual unit level. Using only the pre-treatment features in stage 1 in the absence of any treatment information, we learn…

User modeling plays an important role in delivering customized web services to the users and improving their engagement. However, most user models in the literature do not explicitly consider the temporal behavior of users. More recently,…

We consider the problem of estimating the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in linear structural causal models (SCM) with latent confounders when we have access to a single proxy variable. Several methods (such as…

With the rise of the digital economy and an explosion of available information about consumers, effective personalization of goods and services has become a core business focus for companies to improve revenues and maintain a competitive…

Causal discovery (CD) from time-varying data is important in neuroscience, medicine, and machine learning. Techniques for CD encompass randomized experiments, which are generally unbiased but expensive, and algorithms such as Granger…

In this work, we present sequence-driven structural causal models (SD-SCMs), a framework for specifying causal models with user-defined structure and language-model-defined mechanisms. We characterize how an SD-SCM enables sampling from…