Causality-aware social recommender system with network homophily informed multi-treatment confounders

Abstract

Typical recommender systems utilize observed ratings of users as inputs to learn their preferences and aim to output recommendations of new items that users will like by predicting their potential ratings. The real world is driven by causality given that whether or not a user is made exposed to the item may significantly affect the rating. While some recent methods have taken a causal view to mitigate the confounding bias in observed rating data, few have recognized recommendation as a multiple causal inference problem that concerns numerous items simultaneously in practice. By framing the recommendation as a multiple causal inference problem, this paper develops a causality-aware social recommender that incorporates underlying social network structures with matrix factorization methods for deconfounding in networked observational data to enhance social recommendations. Leveraging social network information, which inherently confounds with the preferences of users, is particularly crucial but not trivial for inferring unobserved confounders in social recommender systems. Considering that connected users in a social network share similar attributes, we propose to incorporate the network homophily into the matrix factorization models through regularization to better learn the latent variables. The extracted latent variables then capture the network informed multi-treatment confounders to mitigate the confounding bias and improve the rating prediction accuracy. The models are estimated through a proximal gradient-based optimization framework, which not only eases the incorporation of the network structure constraints but also improves the computational efficiency of the proposed method. Simulation and case studies are conducted to validate the proposed method.