首次构建带认知不确定性的点击模型,可量化推荐结果的可信度。
An Epistemic Position-Based Click Model: From Interactions to Epistemic Distributions of Relevance and Bias

- 用贝叶斯深度学习建模点击概率中的认知不确定性,输出分布而非点估计。
- 在未见数据上成功捕捉到预测不确定性的变化,传统方法无法做到。
- 适合关注推荐系统可信度、需评估预测风险的研究者与工程师。
用户对排序结果的点击行为受内容相关性与展示位置双重影响。现有点击模型多将点击概率建模为相关性与位置因素的乘积,但仅提供频率学派的点估计,无法体现预测的置信度。本文提出首个基于证据的深度学习点击模型,以位置为基础的点击模型为框架,输入项目与位置特征后,输出每个相关性与位置偏差变量的贝塔分布。这些分布刻画了对点击概率及吸引效应、位置偏见的信念不确定性。主要挑战在于优化过程,我们提出近似与条件化技术以保证数值稳定性和方差降低。实验表明,本方法可在未见数据上捕捉认知不确定性,而标准策略梯度方法无法学习有效分布。我们认为,这是首次将贝叶斯不确定性引入点击建模的重要进展。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
User interactions with rankings are affected by both items' relevances and display positions. Accordingly, click probabilities are often modeled as a product of relevance and position factors; and for improving recommendation and search, one needs to disentangle relevance from position bias. However, existing click models only provide frequentist point-estimates that do not capture any measure of epistemic uncertainty. Consequently, there is no indication of how much confidence one should have in their predictions. In this work, we introduce the first evidential deep-learning approach to form an epistemic alternative to the important position-based click model. Our learned model takes as input item and position features and outputs a beta-distribution for every relevance and position-bias variable of the position-based model. These distributions capture epistemic uncertainty about click probabilities and the underlying effects of attraction and position bias. The main challenge of our approach is its optimization for which we propose approximation and conditioning techniques to provide numerical stability and variance reduction. Our experiments indicate that our approach captures epistemic uncertainty in predictions on previously-unseen data, whereas standard policy gradients fail to learn meaningful distributions. We believe our contribution of the first contextual epistemic click model constitutes an important step in incorporating Bayesian uncertainty into click modeling.
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