解决缺失数据下分布推断难题,用核最近邻方法精准估计用户行为分布。
Learning Counterfactual Distributions via Kernel Nearest Neighbors
- 基于核方法构建分布型矩阵补全,利用核均值嵌入建模分布结构。
- 在缺失非随机且正则性不满足条件下,仍能一致恢复真实分布。
- 支持多测量输入,对异方差噪声鲁棒,适合高维分布推断场景。
考虑多个单位(如个人、群体、地理区域)与结果(如治疗、时间、项目)的组合场景,目标是为每个单位-结果条目学习其联合分布(如用户在特定应用版本下的周消费和参与度分布)。常见挑战包括缺失非随机数据:观测仅存在于部分单位-结果组合,且观测可及性与分布特性相关,存在未观测混杂。此外,对任何已观测条目,仅能获得来自底层分布的有限样本。本文将问题转化为新颖的分布型矩阵补全框架,提出基于核的分布最近邻方法以估计底层分布。通过利用最大均值差异并结合核均值嵌入上的因子模型,证明即使在缺失非随机且正则性条件不成立时,仍可一致恢复底层分布。进一步表明,当每个观测条目有至少两个测量值时,该方法对异方差噪声具有鲁棒性,而此前仅单次测量的方法不具备此性质。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Consider a setting with multiple units (e.g., individuals, cohorts, geographic locations) and outcomes (e.g., treatments, times, items), where the goal is to learn a multivariate distribution for each unit-outcome entry, such as the distribution of a user's weekly spend and engagement under a specific mobile app version. A common challenge is the prevalence of missing not at random data, where observations are available only for certain unit-outcome combinations and the observation availability can be correlated with the properties of distributions themselves, i.e., there is unobserved confounding. An additional challenge is that for any observed unit-outcome entry, we only have a finite number of samples from the underlying distribution. We tackle these two challenges by casting the problem into a novel distributional matrix completion framework and introduce a kernel based distributional generalization of nearest neighbors to estimate the underlying distributions. By leveraging maximum mean discrepancies and a suitable factor model on the kernel mean embeddings of the underlying distributions, we establish consistent recovery of the underlying distributions even when data is missing not at random and positivity constraints are violated. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our nearest neighbors approach is robust to heteroscedastic noise, provided we have access to two or more measurements for the observed unit-outcome entries, a robustness not present in prior works on nearest neighbors with single measurements.
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