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Addressing Confounding Feature Issue for Causal Recommendation

Published: 07 February 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In recommender systems, some features directly affect whether an interaction would happen, making the happened interactions not necessarily indicate user preference. For instance, short videos are objectively easier to finish even though the user may not like the video. We term such feature as confounding feature, and video length is a confounding feature in video recommendation. If we fit a model on such interaction data, just as done by most data-driven recommender systems, the model will be biased to recommend short videos more, and deviate from user actual requirement.
This work formulates and addresses the problem from the causal perspective. Assuming there are some factors affecting both the confounding feature and other item features, e.g., the video creator, we find the confounding feature opens a backdoor path behind user-item matching and introduces spurious correlation. To remove the effect of backdoor path, we propose a framework named Deconfounding Causal Recommendation(DCR), which performs intervened inference with do-calculus. Nevertheless, evaluating do-calculus requires to sum over the prediction on all possible values of confounding feature, significantly increasing the time cost. To address the efficiency challenge, we further propose a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model architecture, modeling each value of confounding feature with a separate expert module. Through this way, we retain the model expressiveness with few additional costs. We demonstrate DCR on the backbone model of neural factorization machine (NFM), showing that DCR leads to more accurate prediction of user preference with small inference time cost. We release our code at: https://github.com/zyang1580/DCR.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 41, Issue 3
July 2023
890 pages
ISSN:1046-8188
EISSN:1558-2868
DOI:10.1145/3582880
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 February 2023
Online AM: 30 August 2022
Accepted: 29 July 2022
Revised: 28 July 2022
Received: 10 May 2022
Published in TOIS Volume 41, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Recommender system
  2. causal inference
  3. causal recommendation
  4. bias
  5. fairness

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  • Research-article
  • Refereed

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  • National Key Research and Development Program of China
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China

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  • (2024)One-bit Deep Hashing: Towards Resource-Efficient Hashing Model with Binary Neural NetworkProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3681496(7162-7171)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
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