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Causal Recommendation: Progresses and Future Directions

Published: 18 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Data-driven recommender systems have demonstrated great success in various Web applications owing to the extraordinary ability of machine learning models to recognize patterns (ie correlation) from users' behaviors. However, they still suffer from several issues such as biases and unfairness due to spurious correlations. Considering the causal mechanism behind data can avoid the influences of such spurious correlations. In this light, embracing causal recommender modeling is an exciting and promising direction.
In this tutorial, we aim to introduce the key concepts in causality and provide a systemic review of existing work on causal recommendation. We will introduce existing methods from two different causal frameworks --- the potential outcome (PO) framework and the structural causal model (SCM). We will give examples and discussions regarding how to utilize different causal tools under these two frameworks to model and solve problems in recommendation. Moreover, we will summarize and compare the paradigms of PO-based and SCM-based recommendation. Besides, we identify some open challenges and potential future directions for this area. We hope this tutorial could stimulate more ideas on this topic and facilitate the development of causality-aware recommender systems.

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  • (2024)Revisiting Reciprocal Recommender Systems: Metrics, Formulation, and MethodProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671734(3714-3723)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
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  • (2024)Uncovering the Propensity Identification Problem in Debiased Recommendations2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00056(653-666)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '23: Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    July 2023
    3567 pages
    ISBN:9781450394086
    DOI:10.1145/3539618
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    Published: 18 July 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. causal recommendation
    2. causality
    3. potential outcome models
    4. structural causal models

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    View all
    • (2024)Revisiting Reciprocal Recommender Systems: Metrics, Formulation, and MethodProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671734(3714-3723)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
    • (2024)An Accurate and Interpretable Framework for Trustworthy Process MonitoringIEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence10.1109/TAI.2023.33196065:5(2241-2252)Online publication date: May-2024
    • (2024)Uncovering the Propensity Identification Problem in Debiased Recommendations2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00056(653-666)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2024)Counterfactual contextual bandit for recommendation under delayed feedbackNeural Computing and Applications10.1007/s00521-024-09800-036:23(14599-14613)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2024
    • (2023)Propensity mattersProceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning10.5555/3618408.3619239(20182-20194)Online publication date: 23-Jul-2023
    • (2023)Pareto Invariant Representation Learning for Multimedia RecommendationProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3581783.3612591(6410-6419)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Equivariant Learning for Out-of-Distribution Cold-start RecommendationProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3581783.3612522(903-914)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2023
    • (2023)CounterCLR: Counterfactual Contrastive Learning with Non-random Missing Data in Recommendation2023 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)10.1109/ICDM58522.2023.00174(1355-1360)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023

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