Properly conducting offline evaluation is crucial for recommender systems.While sampling negative items has traditionally been employed for its efficiency in evaluation, recent studies have highlighted the limitations of this approach, fostering researchers to adopt a more cautious stance toward item-sampling evaluation.However, even in the absence of intentional sampling, negative items may still be missing.This issue arises because typical implicit feedback datasets contain only items that have been interacted with by at least one user in the dataset.Consequently, the included items may not encompass the entire catalog of items that serve as true candidate items during online deployment.In this paper, we investigate the impact of missing candidate items on both the evaluation and learning processes of recommender systems.Our findings demonstrate that missing candidate items lead to the overestimation of model performance and inconsistencies in identifying superior models.Moreover, their absence significantly impairs model training.To address this challenge, we propose evaluation and learning methods based on inverse probability weighting, complemented by a novel protocol for estimating the probabilities of missing items.We show that the proposed evaluation methods recover metrics that closely approximate their true values.Furthermore, the proposed learning method yields a more robust model, even when candidate items are missing from the training data.

Well-calibrated predictions of user preferences are essential for many applications. Since recommender systems typically select the top-N items for users, calibration for those top-N items, rather than for all items, is important. We show that previous calibration methods result in miscalibrated predictions for the top-N items, despite their excellent calibration performance when evaluated on all items. In this work, we address the miscalibration in the top-N recommended items. We first define evaluation metrics for this objective and then propose a generic method to optimize calibration models focusing on the top-N items. It groups the top-N items by their ranks and optimizes distinct calibration models for each group with rank-dependent training weights. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for both explicit and implicit feedback datasets, using diverse classes of recommender models.

Evaluating the causal effect of recommendations is an important objective because the causal effect on user interactions can directly leads to an increase in sales and user engagement. To select an optimal recommendation model, it is common to conduct A/B testing to compare model performance. However, A/B testing of causal effects requires a large number of users, making such experiments costly and risky. We therefore propose the first interleaving methods that can efficiently compare recommendation models in terms of causal effects. In contrast to conventional interleaving methods, we measure the outcomes of both items on an interleaved list and items not on the interleaved list, since the causal effect is the difference between outcomes with and without recommendations. To ensure that the evaluations are unbiased, we either select items with equal probability or weight the outcomes using inverse propensity scores. We then verify the unbiasedness and efficiency of online evaluation methods through simulated online experiments. The results indicate that our proposed methods are unbiased and that they have superior efficiency to A/B testing.

Increasing users’ positive interactions, such as purchases or clicks, is an important objective of recommender systems. Recommenders typically aim to select items that users will interact with. If the recommended items are purchased, an increase in sales is expected. However, the items could have been purchased even without recommendation. Thus, we want to recommend items that results in purchases caused by recommendation. This can be formulated as a ranking problem in terms of the causal effect. Despite its importance, this problem has not been well explored in the related research. It is challenging because the ground truth of causal effect is unobservable, and estimating the causal effect is prone to the bias arising from currently deployed recommenders. This paper proposes an unbiased learning framework for the causal effect of recommendation. Based on the inverse propensity scoring technique, the proposed framework first constructs unbiased estimators for ranking metrics. Then, it conducts empirical risk minimization on the estimators with propensity capping, which reduces variance under finite training samples. Based on the framework, we develop an unbiased learning method for the causal effect extension of a ranking metric. We theoretically analyze the unbiasedness of the proposed method and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other biased learning methods in various settings.

Recommender systems aim to increase user actions such as clicks and purchases. Typical evaluations of recommenders regard the purchase of a recommended item as a success. However, the item may have been purchased even without the recommendation. An uplift is defined as an increase in user actions caused by recommendations. Situations with and without a recommendation cannot both be observed for a specific user-item pair at a given time instance, making uplift-based evaluation and optimization challenging. This paper proposes new evaluation metrics and optimization methods for the uplift in a recommender system. We apply a causal inference framework to estimate the average uplift for the offline evaluation of recommenders. Our evaluation protocol leverages both purchase and recommendation logs under a currently deployed recommender system, to simulate the cases both with and without recommendations. This enables the offline evaluation of the uplift for newly generated recommendation lists. For optimization, we need to define positive and negative samples that are specific to an uplift-based approach. For this purpose, we deduce four classes of items by observing purchase and recommendation logs. We derive the relative priorities among these four classes in terms of the uplift and use them to construct both pointwise and pairwise sampling methods for uplift optimization. Through dedicated experiments with three public datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our optimization methods in improving the uplift.

Computer-aided education systems are now seeking to provide each student with personalized materials based on a student's individual knowledge. To provide suitable learning materials, tracing each student's knowledge over a period of time is important. However, predicting each student's knowledge is difficult because students tend to forget. The forgetting behavior is mainly because of two reasons: the lag time from the previous interaction, and the number of past trials on a question. Although there are a few studies that consider forgetting while modeling a student's knowledge, some models consider only partial information about forgetting, whereas others consider multiple features about forgetting, ignoring a student's learning sequence. In this paper, we focus on modeling and predicting a student's knowledge by considering their forgetting behavior. We extend the deep knowledge tracing model [17], which is a state-of-the-art sequential model for knowledge tracing, to consider forgetting by incorporating multiple types of information related to forgetting. Experiments on knowledge tracing datasets show that our proposed model improves the predictive performance as compared to baselines. Moreover, we also examine that the combination of multiple types of information that affect the behavior of forgetting results in performance improvement.