arXiv:2608.13461cs.LG2026-08

提出新方法精准估计点击后转化率因果效应,避免数据偏差且更稳定。

Doubly Robust Estimation of Causal Effect on CVR with Targeted Regularization

论文配图:Doubly Robust Estimation of Causal Effect on CVR with Targeted Regularization
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 基于半参数理论设计双重稳健估计器,结合目标正则化提升稳定性。
  • 在真实与合成数据上验证效果,收敛速度优于传统方法。
  • 适合电商、广告等需高精度转化率分析的场景,尤其用复杂模型时

点击后转化率(CVR)是电商和广告等领域的重要指标,反映转化流程第二阶段的效率与用户体验。直接对点击样本应用现有因果推断方法会因排除未点击数据而引入样本选择偏差并增加方差。尽管近期研究提出了“理想损失”以实现全样本无偏损失估计,但该损失无偏性并不能保证最终估计器的无偏性。本文从半参数理论出发,针对链式结构结果(如CVR)提出一种新的双重稳健因果效应估计器,并详细推导其理论性质。该方法在使用灵活非参数估计器(包括神经网络)时具有更快的收敛速率,因而更具鲁棒性。基于此理论成果,进一步设计了基于目标正则化的框架以增强数值稳定性和实际可用性。大量合成与真实数据实验表明该方法有效且稳健。此外,我们发现简单结合损失去偏与标准因果估计器表现不佳,凸显为这种CVR型目标设计具备理论保障的新估计器的必要性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Post-click conversion rate (CVR) is a key metric in various scenarios including e-commerce and advertising, reflecting the efficiency and user experience in the second stage of the conversion process. Estimating the causal effect on CVR is therefore of great practical importance. However, directly applying existing causal inference methods to clicked samples introduces sample selection bias and increased variance due to the exclusion of non-click data. Recent studies on CVR prediction introduce "ideal loss", which optimizes model parameters using an unbiased estimate of the loss over the full sample. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that unbiasedness of the loss implies unbiasedness of the final estimator. We revisit this challenge from the perspective of semiparametric theory. Specifically, we develop a new doubly robust causal effect estimator for chain-structured outcomes such as CVR, and derive its theoretical properties in detail. It achieves a faster convergence rate compared to nuisance parameters estimation and is therefore more robust when using flexible nonparametric estimators, including neural networks. Based on these theoretical findings, we further design a framework based on targeted regularization to improve numerical stability and practical applicability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method. In addition, we find that naively combining loss debiasing with standard causal estimators underperforms our method, highlighting the necessity of developing the new estimator tailored to this CVR-style objective with solid theoretical guarantees.

因果推断转化率双稳健目标正则

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