Treatment Effect Estimation for User Interest Exploration on Recommender Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Jiaju, Wang, Wenjie, Gao, Chongming, Wu, Peng, Wei, Jianxiong, Hua, Qingsong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chen, Jiaju
Wang, Wenjie
Gao, Chongming
Wu, Peng
Wei, Jianxiong
Hua, Qingsong
author_facet Chen, Jiaju
Wang, Wenjie
Gao, Chongming
Wu, Peng
Wei, Jianxiong
Hua, Qingsong
contents Recommender systems learn personalized user preferences from user feedback like clicks. However, user feedback is usually biased towards partially observed interests, leaving many users' hidden interests unexplored. Existing approaches typically mitigate the bias, increase recommendation diversity, or use bandit algorithms to balance exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Nevertheless, they fail to consider the potential rewards of recommending different categories of items and lack the global scheduling of allocating top-N recommendations to categories, leading to suboptimal exploration. In this work, we propose an Uplift model-based Recommender (UpliftRec) framework, which regards top-N recommendation as a treatment optimization problem. UpliftRec estimates the treatment effects, i.e., the click-through rate (CTR) under different category exposure ratios, by using observational user feedback. UpliftRec calculates group-level treatment effects to discover users' hidden interests with high CTR rewards and leverages inverse propensity weighting to alleviate confounder bias. Thereafter, UpliftRec adopts a dynamic programming method to calculate the optimal treatment for overall CTR maximization. We implement UpliftRec on different backend models and conduct extensive experiments on three datasets. The empirical results validate the effectiveness of UpliftRec in discovering users' hidden interests while achieving superior recommendation accuracy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_08582
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Treatment Effect Estimation for User Interest Exploration on Recommender Systems
Chen, Jiaju
Wang, Wenjie
Gao, Chongming
Wu, Peng
Wei, Jianxiong
Hua, Qingsong
Information Retrieval
Recommender systems learn personalized user preferences from user feedback like clicks. However, user feedback is usually biased towards partially observed interests, leaving many users' hidden interests unexplored. Existing approaches typically mitigate the bias, increase recommendation diversity, or use bandit algorithms to balance exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Nevertheless, they fail to consider the potential rewards of recommending different categories of items and lack the global scheduling of allocating top-N recommendations to categories, leading to suboptimal exploration. In this work, we propose an Uplift model-based Recommender (UpliftRec) framework, which regards top-N recommendation as a treatment optimization problem. UpliftRec estimates the treatment effects, i.e., the click-through rate (CTR) under different category exposure ratios, by using observational user feedback. UpliftRec calculates group-level treatment effects to discover users' hidden interests with high CTR rewards and leverages inverse propensity weighting to alleviate confounder bias. Thereafter, UpliftRec adopts a dynamic programming method to calculate the optimal treatment for overall CTR maximization. We implement UpliftRec on different backend models and conduct extensive experiments on three datasets. The empirical results validate the effectiveness of UpliftRec in discovering users' hidden interests while achieving superior recommendation accuracy.
title Treatment Effect Estimation for User Interest Exploration on Recommender Systems
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08582