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Causal Inference in Recommender Systems

A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300). This special issue belongs to the section "Multidisciplinary Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 15 April 2025 | Viewed by 2245

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230052, China
Interests: recommendation; information retrieval; causal inference; large language model; natural language processing

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Interests: recommender system; large language models; causal inference; explainable AI; reinforcement learning

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The recommender system serves many users with personalized information filtering across a wide spectrum of online applications such as e-commerce, search engines, and social media. Recent years have witnessed the success of incorporating causal inference theories and techniques into recommender systems to enhance the user experience regarding the accuracy of user preference modeling and estimation, as well as the fairness, unbiasedness, and transparency of recommendations. In addition, these recommender systems also draw upon concepts from entropy and information theory. The connection between these directions indicates opportunities to futher improve the performance of recommender systems. For example, recommender systems can better understand and predict user behavior by considering the entropy of user preferences and the information gain obtained through causal inference models. This Special Issue is aimed at bringing together the most contemporary achievements and breakthroughs in the field of recommender systems that embrace causal inference and information theory. We invite novel contributions on topics including, but not restricted to, the following:

  • Causal view of recommender system;
  • Causal user modeling;
  • Causal effect estimation for recommendation;
  • Bias and debias in recommender system;
  • Causal representation learning;
  • Counterfactual learning for recommendation;
  • Uncertainty of recommendation;
  • Information decomposition for user modeling;
  • Causal discovery in recommender system;
  • Causal explanation for recommendation;
  • Causal evaluation of recommender system;
  • Causal tools and resources of recommender system;
  • Unmeasured confounder modeling based on information theory;
  • Debiased recommendation based on information theory.

Technical Committee Member

Name: Haoxuan Li
Email: [email protected]
Affiliation: Center for Data Science, Peking University, Beijing 100091, China
Interests: causal inference; recommendation; selection bias; fairness; large language model
Website: https://pattern.swarma.org/user/62913

Prof. Dr. Fuli Feng
Dr. Xu Chen
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • recommendation
  • causal inference
  • inference retrieval
  • ranking
  • information theory
  • information bottleneck
  • representation learning
  • counterfactual explanation

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 634 KiB  
Article
Debiasing the Conversion Rate Prediction Model in the Presence of Delayed Implicit Feedback
by Taojun Hu and Xiao-Hua Zhou
Entropy 2024, 26(9), 792; https://doi.org/10.3390/e26090792 - 15 Sep 2024
Viewed by 923
Abstract
The recommender system (RS) has been widely adopted in many applications, including online advertisements. Predicting the conversion rate (CVR) can help in evaluating the effects of advertisements on users and capturing users’ features, playing an important role in RS. In real-world scenarios, implicit [...] Read more.
The recommender system (RS) has been widely adopted in many applications, including online advertisements. Predicting the conversion rate (CVR) can help in evaluating the effects of advertisements on users and capturing users’ features, playing an important role in RS. In real-world scenarios, implicit rather than explicit feedback data are more abundant. Thus, directly training the RS with collected data may lead to suboptimal performance due to selection bias inherited from the nature of implicit feedback. Methods such as reweighting have been proposed to tackle selection bias; however, these methods omit delayed feedback, which often occurs due to limited observation times. We propose a novel likelihood approach combining the assumed parametric model for delayed feedback and the reweighting method to address selection bias. Specifically, the proposed methods minimize the likelihood-based loss using the multi-task learning method. The proposed methods are evaluated on the real-world Coat and Yahoo datasets. The proposed methods improve the AUC by 5.7% on Coat and 3.7% on Yahoo compared with the best baseline models. The proposed methods successfully debias the CVR prediction model in the presence of delayed implicit feedback. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Causal Inference in Recommender Systems)
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