论文标题

通过推荐系统的因果结构学习

Causal Structure Learning with Recommendation System

论文作者

Xu, Shuyuan, Xu, Da, Korpeoglu, Evren, Kumar, Sushant, Guo, Stephen, Achan, Kannan, Zhang, Yongfeng

论文摘要

推荐系统(RS)的基本挑战是了解用户决策基础的因果动态。大多数现有文献通过使用从领域知识推论的因果结构来解决此问题。但是,在许多现象中,领域知识不足,必须从反馈数据中学到因果机制。从RS反馈数据中发现因果机制既新颖又具有挑战性,因为RS本身是一种干预措施,可以影响用户的曝光率和互动意愿。同样,由于这个原因,大多数现有的解决方案都不适当,因为它们需要免费收集的数据。在本文中,我们首先将基本的因果机制作为因果结构模型,并描述一个基于Rs现实世界工作机制的一般因果结构学习框架。我们方法的本质是承认RS干预的未知本质。然后,我们从我们的框架中得出学习目标,并提出一个增强的拉格朗日求解器,以进行有效的优化。我们进行仿真和现实世界实验,以证明我们的方法如何与现有解决方案进行比较,以及来自灵敏度和消融研究的经验分析。

A fundamental challenge of recommendation systems (RS) is understanding the causal dynamics underlying users' decision making. Most existing literature addresses this problem by using causal structures inferred from domain knowledge. However, there are numerous phenomenons where domain knowledge is insufficient, and the causal mechanisms must be learnt from the feedback data. Discovering the causal mechanism from RS feedback data is both novel and challenging, since RS itself is a source of intervention that can influence both the users' exposure and their willingness to interact. Also for this reason, most existing solutions become inappropriate since they require data collected free from any RS. In this paper, we first formulate the underlying causal mechanism as a causal structural model and describe a general causal structure learning framework grounded in the real-world working mechanism of RS. The essence of our approach is to acknowledge the unknown nature of RS intervention. We then derive the learning objective from our framework and propose an augmented Lagrangian solver for efficient optimization. We conduct both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate how our approach compares favorably to existing solutions, together with the empirical analysis from sensitivity and ablation studies.

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