论文标题

深厚的因果推理建议

Deep Causal Reasoning for Recommendations

论文作者

Zhu, Yaochen, Yi, Jing, Xie, Jiayi, Chen, Zhenzhong

论文摘要

传统的推荐系统旨在根据人口观察到的评分来估算用户对项目的评级。与所有观察性研究一样,隐藏的混杂因素(这是影响项目暴露和用户评分的因素)导致估计的系统偏见。因此,推荐系统研究的新趋势是从因果角度否定混杂因素的影响。观察建议中的混杂因素通常在项目之间共享,因此是多起因混杂因素,我们将建议将其模拟为多导致多结果(MCMO)推断问题。具体来说,为了解决混杂的偏见,我们估算了用户特定的潜在变量,这些变量使项目暴露于独立的Bernoulli试验。生成分布由具有分解的逻辑可能性的DNN参数化,而棘手的后代是通过变异推断估算的。在温和的假设下,控制这些因素作为替代混杂因素可以消除多导致混杂因素产生的偏见。此外,我们表明,由于与高维因果空间相关的稀缺观察结果,MCMO建模可能导致较高的差异。幸运的是,我们从理论上证明,将用户功能引入作为预处理变量可以大大提高样品效率并减轻过度拟合。对模拟和现实世界数据集的实证研究表明,所提出的深层因果推荐人比最新的因果推荐人表现出对未观察到的混杂因素的鲁棒性。代码和数据集在https://github.com/yaochenzhu/deep-deconf上发布。

Traditional recommender systems aim to estimate a user's rating to an item based on observed ratings from the population. As with all observational studies, hidden confounders, which are factors that affect both item exposures and user ratings, lead to a systematic bias in the estimation. Consequently, a new trend in recommender system research is to negate the influence of confounders from a causal perspective. Observing that confounders in recommendations are usually shared among items and are therefore multi-cause confounders, we model the recommendation as a multi-cause multi-outcome (MCMO) inference problem. Specifically, to remedy confounding bias, we estimate user-specific latent variables that render the item exposures independent Bernoulli trials. The generative distribution is parameterized by a DNN with factorized logistic likelihood and the intractable posteriors are estimated by variational inference. Controlling these factors as substitute confounders, under mild assumptions, can eliminate the bias incurred by multi-cause confounders. Furthermore, we show that MCMO modeling may lead to high variance due to scarce observations associated with the high-dimensional causal space. Fortunately, we theoretically demonstrate that introducing user features as pre-treatment variables can substantially improve sample efficiency and alleviate overfitting. Empirical studies on simulated and real-world datasets show that the proposed deep causal recommender shows more robustness to unobserved confounders than state-of-the-art causal recommenders. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/yaochenzhu/deep-deconf.

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