Debiased Collaborative Filtering with Kernel-Based Causal Balancing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Haoxuan, Zheng, Chunyuan, Xiao, Yanghao, Wu, Peng, Geng, Zhi, Chen, Xu, Cui, Peng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Li, Haoxuan
Zheng, Chunyuan
Xiao, Yanghao
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
Chen, Xu
Cui, Peng
author_facet Li, Haoxuan
Zheng, Chunyuan
Xiao, Yanghao
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
Chen, Xu
Cui, Peng
contents Debiased collaborative filtering aims to learn an unbiased prediction model by removing different biases in observational datasets. To solve this problem, one of the simple and effective methods is based on the propensity score, which adjusts the observational sample distribution to the target one by reweighting observed instances. Ideally, propensity scores should be learned with causal balancing constraints. However, existing methods usually ignore such constraints or implement them with unreasonable approximations, which may affect the accuracy of the learned propensity scores. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first analyze the gaps between the causal balancing requirements and existing methods such as learning the propensity with cross-entropy loss or manually selecting functions to balance. Inspired by these gaps, we propose to approximate the balancing functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert space and demonstrate that, based on the universal property and representer theorem of kernel functions, the causal balancing constraints can be better satisfied. Meanwhile, we propose an algorithm that adaptively balances the kernel function and theoretically analyze the generalization error bound of our methods. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, and to promote this research direction, we have released our project at https://github.com/haoxuanli-pku/ICLR24-Kernel-Balancing.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_19596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Debiased Collaborative Filtering with Kernel-Based Causal Balancing
Li, Haoxuan
Zheng, Chunyuan
Xiao, Yanghao
Wu, Peng
Geng, Zhi
Chen, Xu
Cui, Peng
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Debiased collaborative filtering aims to learn an unbiased prediction model by removing different biases in observational datasets. To solve this problem, one of the simple and effective methods is based on the propensity score, which adjusts the observational sample distribution to the target one by reweighting observed instances. Ideally, propensity scores should be learned with causal balancing constraints. However, existing methods usually ignore such constraints or implement them with unreasonable approximations, which may affect the accuracy of the learned propensity scores. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we first analyze the gaps between the causal balancing requirements and existing methods such as learning the propensity with cross-entropy loss or manually selecting functions to balance. Inspired by these gaps, we propose to approximate the balancing functions in reproducing kernel Hilbert space and demonstrate that, based on the universal property and representer theorem of kernel functions, the causal balancing constraints can be better satisfied. Meanwhile, we propose an algorithm that adaptively balances the kernel function and theoretically analyze the generalization error bound of our methods. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, and to promote this research direction, we have released our project at https://github.com/haoxuanli-pku/ICLR24-Kernel-Balancing.
title Debiased Collaborative Filtering with Kernel-Based Causal Balancing
topic Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19596