论文标题

解决因果推荐的混杂功能问题

Addressing Confounding Feature Issue for Causal Recommendation

论文作者

He, Xiangnan, Zhang, Yang, Feng, Fuli, Song, Chonggang, Yi, Lingling, Ling, Guohui, Zhang, Yongdong

论文摘要

在推荐系统中,某些功能直接影响是否会发生交互,这使事件交互不一定表明用户偏好。例如,即使用户不喜欢视频,简短的视频也更容易完成。我们称其为混杂功能,视频长度是视频推荐中的混杂功能。如果我们在大多数数据驱动的推荐系统中拟合模型,那么该模型将有偏见以更多地推荐简短的视频,并偏离用户实际需求。 这项工作从因果的角度制定并解决了问题。假设有一些因素影响混杂功能和其他项目功能,例如视频创建者,我们发现混杂功能打开了用户项目匹配背后的后门路径,并引入了虚假的相关性。为了删除后门路径的效果,我们提出了一个名为deconfrunding因果推荐(DCR)的框架,该框架与DO-Calculus进行了中间的推理。然而,评估do微积分需要对所有混杂特征的所有可能值的预测进行汇总,从而大大增加了时间成本。为了应对效率挑战,我们进一步提出了专家(MOE)模型架构的混合物,将混淆功能的每个值与单独的专家模块建模。通过这种方式,我们保留了模型表现力,几乎没有额外的成本。我们证明了神经分解机(NFM)主链模型的DCR,表明DCR可以通过较小的推理时间成本更准确地预测用户偏好。

In recommender system, some feature directly affects whether an interaction would happen, making the happened interactions not necessarily indicate user preference. For instance, short videos are objectively easier to be finished even though the user does 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.

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