论文标题

推荐因果关系的无偏学习

Unbiased Learning for the Causal Effect of Recommendation

论文作者

Sato, Masahiro, Takemori, Sho, Singh, Janmajay, Ohkuma, Tomoko

论文摘要

增加用户的积极互动(例如购买或点击)是推荐系统的重要目标。推荐人通常旨在选择用户将与之互动的项目。如果购买了推荐的商品,则预计销售额会增加。但是,即使没有建议,这些物品也可以购买。因此,我们想推荐项目,以导致推荐造成的购买。就因果效应而言,这可以作为排名问题。尽管它很重要,但在相关研究中尚未得到很好的探索。这是充满挑战的,因为因果效应的基础真理是无法观察到的,并且估计因果效应倾向于目前部署的推荐人产生的偏见。本文提出了一个公正的学习框架,以实现建议的因果关系。基于反向倾向评分技术,所提出的框架首先构造了排名指标的无偏估计器。然后,它通过倾向上限对估计器进行经验风险最小化,从而降低了有限训练样本下的方差。基于框架,我们为排名度量的因果效应扩展开发了一种公正的学习方法。我们从理论上分析了所提出的方法的无偏见,并从经验上证明,所提出的方法在各种环境中都优于其他有偏见的学习方法。

Increasing users' positive interactions, such as purchases or clicks, is an important objective of recommender systems. Recommenders typically aim to select items that users will interact with. If the recommended items are purchased, an increase in sales is expected. However, the items could have been purchased even without recommendation. Thus, we want to recommend items that results in purchases caused by recommendation. This can be formulated as a ranking problem in terms of the causal effect. Despite its importance, this problem has not been well explored in the related research. It is challenging because the ground truth of causal effect is unobservable, and estimating the causal effect is prone to the bias arising from currently deployed recommenders. This paper proposes an unbiased learning framework for the causal effect of recommendation. Based on the inverse propensity scoring technique, the proposed framework first constructs unbiased estimators for ranking metrics. Then, it conducts empirical risk minimization on the estimators with propensity capping, which reduces variance under finite training samples. Based on the framework, we develop an unbiased learning method for the causal effect extension of a ranking metric. We theoretically analyze the unbiasedness of the proposed method and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other biased learning methods in various settings.

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