Causal Inference for Recommendation 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)