Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
12-2023
Abstract
Causality-based recommendation systems focus on the causal effects of user-item interactions resulting from item exposure (i.e., which items are recommended or exposed to the user), as opposed to conventional correlation-based recommendation. They are gaining popularity due to their multi-sided benefits to users, sellers and platforms alike. However, existing causality-based recommendation methods require additional input in the form of exposure data and/or propensity scores (i.e., the probability of exposure) for training. Such data, crucial for modeling causality in recommendation, are often not available in real-world situations due to technical or privacy constraints. In this paper, we bridge the gap by proposing a new framework, called Propensity Estimation for Causality-based Recommendation (PropCare). It can estimate the propensity and exposure from a more practical setup, where only interaction data are available without any ground truth on exposure or propensity in training and inference. We demonstrate that, by relating the pairwise characteristics between propensity and item popularity, PropCare enables competitive causality-based recommendation given only the conventional interaction data. We further present a theoretical analysis on the bias of the causal effect under our model estimation. Finally, we empirically evaluate PropCare through both quantitative and qualitative experiments.
Keywords
Causality-based recommendation, Exposure, Propensity estimation
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering
Publication
NIPS '23: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, New Orleans, December 10-16
First Page
51688
Last Page
51705
Publisher
NIPS
City or Country
New Orleans
Citation
LIU, Zhongzhou; FANG, Yuan; and WU, Min.
Estimating propensity for causality-based recommendation without exposure data. (2023). NIPS '23: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, New Orleans, December 10-16. 51688-51705.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8250
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.