New User Event Prediction Through the Lens of Causal Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yuchi, Henry Shaowu, Zhu, Shixiang, Dong, Li, Arisoy, Yigit M., Spencer, Matthew C.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Yuchi, Henry Shaowu
Zhu, Shixiang
Dong, Li
Arisoy, Yigit M.
Spencer, Matthew C.
author_facet Yuchi, Henry Shaowu
Zhu, Shixiang
Dong, Li
Arisoy, Yigit M.
Spencer, Matthew C.
contents Modeling and analysis for event series generated by users of heterogeneous behavioral patterns are closely involved in our daily lives, including credit card fraud detection, online platform user recommendation, and social network analysis. The most commonly adopted approach to this task is to assign users to behavior-based categories and analyze each of them separately. However, this requires extensive data to fully understand the user behavior, presenting challenges in modeling newcomers without significant historical knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel discrete event prediction framework for new users with limited history, without needing to know the user's category. We treat the user event history as the "treatment" for future events and the user category as the key confounder. Thus, the prediction problem can be framed as counterfactual outcome estimation, where each event is re-weighted by its inverse propensity score. We demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed framework with a numerical simulation study and two real-world applications, including Netflix rating prediction and seller contact prediction for customer support at Amazon.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_05625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle New User Event Prediction Through the Lens of Causal Inference
Yuchi, Henry Shaowu
Zhu, Shixiang
Dong, Li
Arisoy, Yigit M.
Spencer, Matthew C.
Methodology
Machine Learning
Modeling and analysis for event series generated by users of heterogeneous behavioral patterns are closely involved in our daily lives, including credit card fraud detection, online platform user recommendation, and social network analysis. The most commonly adopted approach to this task is to assign users to behavior-based categories and analyze each of them separately. However, this requires extensive data to fully understand the user behavior, presenting challenges in modeling newcomers without significant historical knowledge. In this work, we propose a novel discrete event prediction framework for new users with limited history, without needing to know the user's category. We treat the user event history as the "treatment" for future events and the user category as the key confounder. Thus, the prediction problem can be framed as counterfactual outcome estimation, where each event is re-weighted by its inverse propensity score. We demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed framework with a numerical simulation study and two real-world applications, including Netflix rating prediction and seller contact prediction for customer support at Amazon.
title New User Event Prediction Through the Lens of Causal Inference
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05625