Leveraging heterogeneous spillover in maximizing contextual bandit rewards

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed, Zheleva, Elena
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908698640646144
author Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
Zheleva, Elena
author_facet Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
Zheleva, Elena
contents Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item to recommend) for each user and thus maximize the cumulative rewards from user engagement with the recommendations. The context that these algorithms typically consider are the user and item attributes. However, in the context of social networks where $\textit{the action of one user can influence the actions and rewards of other users,}$ neighbors' actions are also a very important context, as they can have not only predictive power but also can impact future rewards through spillover. Moreover, influence susceptibility can vary for different people based on their preferences and the closeness of ties to other users which leads to heterogeneity in the spillover effects. Here, we present a framework that allows contextual multi-armed bandits to account for such heterogeneous spillovers when choosing the best arm for each user. Our experiments on several semi-synthetic and real-world datasets show that our framework leads to significantly higher rewards than existing state-of-the-art solutions that ignore the network information and potential spillover.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging heterogeneous spillover in maximizing contextual bandit rewards
Faruk, Ahmed Sayeed
Zheleva, Elena
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
Recommender systems relying on contextual multi-armed bandits continuously improve relevant item recommendations by taking into account the contextual information. The objective of bandit algorithms is to learn the best arm (e.g., best item to recommend) for each user and thus maximize the cumulative rewards from user engagement with the recommendations. The context that these algorithms typically consider are the user and item attributes. However, in the context of social networks where $\textit{the action of one user can influence the actions and rewards of other users,}$ neighbors' actions are also a very important context, as they can have not only predictive power but also can impact future rewards through spillover. Moreover, influence susceptibility can vary for different people based on their preferences and the closeness of ties to other users which leads to heterogeneity in the spillover effects. Here, we present a framework that allows contextual multi-armed bandits to account for such heterogeneous spillovers when choosing the best arm for each user. Our experiments on several semi-synthetic and real-world datasets show that our framework leads to significantly higher rewards than existing state-of-the-art solutions that ignore the network information and potential spillover.
title Leveraging heterogeneous spillover in maximizing contextual bandit rewards
topic Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10259