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Causal Inference for Recommendation Systems
David Blei

Sat Dec 10 07:30 AM -- 08:15 AM (PST) @
in "What If?" Inference and Learning of Hypothetical and Counterfactual Interventions in Complex Systems »

We develop a causal inference approach to recommender systems. Observational recommendation data contains two sources of information: which items each user decided to look at and which of those items each user liked. We assume these two types of information come from different models---the exposure data comes from a model by which users discover items to consider; the click data comes from a model by which users decide which items they like. Traditionally, recommender systems use the click data alone (or ratings data) to infer the user preferences. But this inference is biased by the exposure data, i.e., that users do not consider each item independently at random. We use causal inference to correct for this bias. On real-world data, we demonstrate that causal inference for recommender systems leads to improved generalization to new data.

(Joint work with Dawen Liang and Laurent Charlin)

Author Information

David Blei (Columbia University)

David Blei is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science at Columbia University, and a member of the Columbia Data Science Institute. His research is in statistical machine learning, involving probabilistic topic models, Bayesian nonparametric methods, and approximate posterior inference algorithms for massive data. He works on a variety of applications, including text, images, music, social networks, user behavior, and scientific data. David has received several awards for his research, including a Sloan Fellowship (2010), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2011), Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2011), Blavatnik Faculty Award (2013), and ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2013). He is a fellow of the ACM.

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