Related papers: Causal Inference on Stopped Random Walks in Online…
Causal inference on a population of units connected through a network often presents technical challenges, including how to account for interference. In the presence of local interference, for instance, potential outcomes of a unit depend…
Live online social broadcasting services like YouTube Live and Twitch have steadily gained popularity due to improved bandwidth, ease of generating content and the ability to earn revenue on the generated content. In contrast to traditional…
This dissertation focuses on modern causal inference under uncertainty and data restrictions, with applications to neoadjuvant clinical trials, distributed data networks, and robust individualized decision making. In the first project, we…
With expansion of the video advertising market, research to predict the effects of video advertising is getting more attention. Although effect prediction of image advertising has been explored a lot, prediction for video advertising is…
Real-time Bidding (RTB) advertisers wish to \textit{know in advance} the expected cost and yield of ad campaigns to avoid trial-and-error expenses. However, Campaign Performance Forecasting (CPF), a sequence modeling task involving tens of…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
Budget allocation in online advertising deals with distributing the campaign (insertion order) level budgets to different sub-campaigns which employ different targeting criteria and may perform differently in terms of return-on-investment…
In the context of having an instrumental variable, the standard practice in causal inference begins by targeting an effect of interest and proceeds by formulating assumptions enabling its identification. We turn this around by adhering to…
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…
The targeted direct-to-customer marketing of unapproved stem cell treatments by a questionable online industry is directed at vulnerable users who search the Internet in the hope of a cure. This behavior especially poses a threat to…
Visual social media platforms have become primary venues for political discourse, yet we know little about how moralization operates differently across platforms and topics. Analyzing 2,027,595 TikToks and 1,126,972 Instagram posts during…
We consider an online ad network problem in which an ad exchange auctions ad slots and intermediaries called demand side platforms (DSPs) buy these ad slots for their clients (advertisers). An intermediary represents multiple advertisers.…
The majority of online display ads are served through real-time bidding (RTB) --- each ad display impression is auctioned off in real-time when it is just being generated from a user visit. To place an ad automatically and optimally, it is…
Understanding what leads to effective conversations can aid the design of better computer-mediated communication platforms. In particular, prior observational work has sought to identify behaviors of individuals that correlate to their…
Many events and policies (treatments) occur at specific spatial locations, with researchers interested in their effects on nearby units. I approach the spatial treatment setting from an experimental perspective: What ideal experiment would…
Budget management strategies in repeated auctions have received growing attention in online advertising markets. However, previous work on budget management in online bidding mainly focused on second-price auctions. The rapid shift from…
Social networks have been popular platforms for information propagation. An important use case is viral marketing: given a promotion budget, an advertiser can choose some influential users as the seed set and provide them free or discounted…
Randomized experiments have become a standard tool in economics. In analyzing randomized experiments, the traditional approach has been based on the Stable Unit Treatment Value (SUTVA: \cite{rubin}) assumption which dictates that there is…
Identifying covariates that modify treatment effects is a central problem in causal inference. Yet existing data-adaptive procedures do not provide finite-sample control over the expected number of false discoveries, risking spurious…
Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…