ESCM2: entire space counterfactual multi-task model for post-click conversion rate estimation
Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and …, 2022•dl.acm.org
Accurate estimation of post-click conversion rate is critical for building recommender
systems, which has long been confronted with sample selection bias and data sparsity
issues. Methods in the Entire Space Multi-task Model (ESMM) family leverage the sequential
pattern of user actions,\ie impression→click→conversion to address data sparsity issue.
However, they still fail to ensure the unbiasedness of CVR estimates. In this paper, we
theoretically demonstrate that ESMM suffers from the following two problems:(1) Inherent …
systems, which has long been confronted with sample selection bias and data sparsity
issues. Methods in the Entire Space Multi-task Model (ESMM) family leverage the sequential
pattern of user actions,\ie impression→click→conversion to address data sparsity issue.
However, they still fail to ensure the unbiasedness of CVR estimates. In this paper, we
theoretically demonstrate that ESMM suffers from the following two problems:(1) Inherent …
Accurate estimation of post-click conversion rate is critical for building recommender systems, which has long been confronted with sample selection bias and data sparsity issues. Methods in the Entire Space Multi-task Model (ESMM) family leverage the sequential pattern of user actions, \ie to address data sparsity issue. However, they still fail to ensure the unbiasedness of CVR estimates. In this paper, we theoretically demonstrate that ESMM suffers from the following two problems: (1) Inherent Estimation Bias (IEB) for CVR estimation, where the CVR estimate is inherently higher than the ground truth; (2) Potential Independence Priority (PIP) for CTCVR estimation, where ESMM might overlook the causality from click to conversion. To this end, we devise a principled approach named Entire Space Counterfactual Multi-task Modelling (ESCM), which employs a counterfactual risk miminizer as a regularizer in ESMM to address both IEB and PIP issues simultaneously. Extensive experiments on offline datasets and online environments demonstrate that our proposed ESCM can largely mitigate the inherent IEB and PIP issues and achieve better performance than baseline models.
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