Uplift Modeling Under Limited Supervision

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Panagopoulos, George, Malitesta, Daniele, Malliaros, Fragkiskos D., Pang, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Panagopoulos, George
Malitesta, Daniele
Malliaros, Fragkiskos D.
Pang, Jun
author_facet Panagopoulos, George
Malitesta, Daniele
Malliaros, Fragkiskos D.
Pang, Jun
contents Estimating causal effects in e-commerce tends to involve costly treatment assignments which can be impractical in large-scale settings. Leveraging machine learning to predict such treatment effects without actual intervention is a standard practice to diminish the risk. However, existing methods for treatment effect prediction tend to rely on training sets of substantial size, which are built from real experiments and are thus inherently risky to create. In this work we propose a graph neural network to diminish the required training set size, relying on graphs that are common in e-commerce data. Specifically, we view the problem as node regression with a restricted number of labeled instances, develop a two-model neural architecture akin to previous causal effect estimators, and test varying message-passing layers for encoding. Furthermore, as an extra step, we combine the model with an acquisition function to guide the creation of the training set in settings with extremely low experimental budget. The framework is flexible since each step can be used separately with other models or treatment policies. The experiments on real large-scale networks indicate a clear advantage of our methodology over the state of the art, which in many cases performs close to random, underlining the need for models that can generalize with limited supervision to reduce experimental risks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_19289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uplift Modeling Under Limited Supervision
Panagopoulos, George
Malitesta, Daniele
Malliaros, Fragkiskos D.
Pang, Jun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
Estimating causal effects in e-commerce tends to involve costly treatment assignments which can be impractical in large-scale settings. Leveraging machine learning to predict such treatment effects without actual intervention is a standard practice to diminish the risk. However, existing methods for treatment effect prediction tend to rely on training sets of substantial size, which are built from real experiments and are thus inherently risky to create. In this work we propose a graph neural network to diminish the required training set size, relying on graphs that are common in e-commerce data. Specifically, we view the problem as node regression with a restricted number of labeled instances, develop a two-model neural architecture akin to previous causal effect estimators, and test varying message-passing layers for encoding. Furthermore, as an extra step, we combine the model with an acquisition function to guide the creation of the training set in settings with extremely low experimental budget. The framework is flexible since each step can be used separately with other models or treatment policies. The experiments on real large-scale networks indicate a clear advantage of our methodology over the state of the art, which in many cases performs close to random, underlining the need for models that can generalize with limited supervision to reduce experimental risks.
title Uplift Modeling Under Limited Supervision
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.19289