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Estimating Treatment Effects under Recommender Interference: A Structured Neural Networks Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Ruohan Zhan
  • Shichao Han
  • Yuchen Hu
  • Zhenling Jiang
Abstract
Recommender systems are essential for content-sharing platforms by curating personalized content. To evaluate updates to recommender systems targeting content creators, platforms frequently rely on creator-side randomized experiments. The treatment effect measures the change in outcomes when a new algorithm is implemented compared to the status quo. We show that the standard difference-in-means estimator can lead to biased estimates due to recommender interference that arises when treated and control creators compete for exposure. We propose a "recommender choice model" that describes which item gets exposed from a pool containing both treated and control items. By combining a structural choice model with neural networks, this framework directly models the interference pathway while accounting for rich viewer-content heterogeneity. We construct a debiased estimator of the treatment effect and prove it is $\sqrt n$-consistent and asymptotically normal with potentially correlated samples. We validate our estimator's empirical performance with a field experiment on Weixin short-video platform. In addition to the standard creator-side experiment, we conduct a costly double-sided randomization design to obtain a benchmark estimate free from interference bias. We show that the proposed estimator yields results comparable to the benchmark, whereas the standard difference-in-means estimator can exhibit significant bias and even produce reversed signs.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruohan Zhan & Shichao Han & Yuchen Hu & Zhenling Jiang, 2024. "Estimating Treatment Effects under Recommender Interference: A Structured Neural Networks Approach," Papers 2406.14380, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2024.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2406.14380
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
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