AD-AUG: Adversarial Data Augmentation for Counterfactual Recommendation

  • Yifan Wang
  • , Yifang Qin
  • , Yu Han
  • , Mingyang Yin
  • , Jingren Zhou
  • , Hongxia Yang
  • , Ming Zhang

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) has become one of the most popular and widely used methods in recommender systems, but its performance degrades sharply in practice due to the sparsity and bias of the real-world user feedback data. In this paper, we propose a novel counterfactual data augmentation framework AD-AUG to mitigate the impact of the imperfect training data and empower CF models. The key idea of AD-AUG is to answer the counterfactual question: “what would be a user’s feedback if his previous purchase history had been different?”. Our framework is composed of an augmenter model and a recommender model. The augmenter model aims to generate counterfactual user feedback based on the observed ones, while the recommender leverages the original and counterfactual user feedback data to provide the final recommendation. In particular, we design two adversarial learning-based methods from both “bottom-up” data-oriented and “top-down” model-oriented perspectives for counterfactual learning. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that the AD-AUG can greatly enhance a wide range of CF models, demonstrating our framework’s effectiveness and generality.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2022, Proceedings
EditorsMassih-Reza Amini, Stéphane Canu, Asja Fischer, Tias Guns, Petra Kralj Novak, Grigorios Tsoumakas
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages474-490
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783031263866
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022 - Grenoble, France
Duration: 19 Sept 202223 Sept 2022

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume13713 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference22nd Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, ECML PKDD 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityGrenoble
Period19/09/2223/09/22

Keywords

  • Collaborative filtering
  • Counterfactual augmentation
  • Recommending systems

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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