Causal Embeddings for Recommendation: An Extended Abstract

Causal Embeddings for Recommendation: An Extended Abstract

Flavian Vasile, Stephen Bonner

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Best Sister Conferences. Pages 6236-6240. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/870

Recommendations are commonly used to modify user’s natural behavior, for example, increasing product sales or the time spent on a website. This results in a gap between the ultimate business ob- jective and the classical setup where recommenda- tions are optimized to be coherent with past user be- havior. To bridge this gap, we propose a new learn- ing setup for recommendation that optimizes for the Incremental Treatment Effect (ITE) of the policy. We show this is equivalent to learning to predict recommendation outcomes under a fully random recommendation policy and propose a new domain adaptation algorithm that learns from logged data containing outcomes from a biased recommenda- tion policy and predicts recommendation outcomes according to random exposure. We compare our method against state-of-the-art factorization meth- ods, in addition to new approaches of causal rec- ommendation and show significant improvements.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Learning Preferences or Rankings
Machine Learning: Transfer, Adaptation, Multi-task Learning