论文标题

情节结局的连续归因,以提高有效和有针对性的在线测量

Continuous Attribution of Episodical Outcomes for More Efficient and Targeted Online Measurement

论文作者

Deng, Alex, Du, Michelle, Matlin, Anna

论文摘要

在线实验平台以低成本和大规模收集用户反馈。一些系统甚至支持实时或接近实时数据处理,并且可以不断更新指标和统计信息。可以观察到许多常用的指标,例如点击和页面视图,不会延迟太多。但是,只有在几个小时或几天后才能观察到许多重要的信号,并且噪声在整个情节的持续时间内增加。当情节结果遵循复杂的用户产品相互作用序列时,很难理解哪些相互作用会导致最终结果。我们没有明显的归因逻辑可以将正面或负面结果与我们在不同时间所做的行动和选择相关联。这种归因逻辑对于在更精细的粒度上解锁更有针对性和有效的测量至关重要,最终可能会导致增强学习的全部能力。在本文中,我们借用了因果替代的想法,可以使用逐步观察的领先指标对长期结局进行建模,并将其应用于值函数,以跟踪进度的最终结果,并将其归因于各种用户产品交互步骤。将这种方法应用于Airbnb的宾客预订指标,导致50%至85%的显着差异,同时与预订度量指标本身很好地保持一致。连续归因使我们能够为每个产品页面视图分配一个实用程序分数,并且可以灵活地将此分数进一步汇总到各种感兴趣的单位,例如搜索和列表。我们提供归因的多个现实世界应用,以说明其多功能性。

Online experimentation platforms collect user feedback at low cost and large scale. Some systems even support real-time or near real-time data processing, and can update metrics and statistics continuously. Many commonly used metrics, such as clicks and page views, can be observed without much delay. However, many important signals can only be observed after several hours or days, with noise adding up over the duration of the episode. When episodical outcomes follow a complex sequence of user-product interactions, it is difficult to understand which interactions lead to the final outcome. There is no obvious attribution logic for us to associate a positive or negative outcome back to the actions and choices we made at different times. This attribution logic is critical to unlocking more targeted and efficient measurement at a finer granularity that could eventually lead to the full capability of reinforcement learning. In this paper, we borrow the idea of Causal Surrogacy to model a long-term outcome using leading indicators that are incrementally observed and apply it as the value function to track the progress towards the final outcome and attribute incrementally to various user-product interaction steps. Applying this approach to the guest booking metric at Airbnb resulted in significant variance reductions of 50% to 85%, while aligning well with the booking metric itself. Continuous attribution allows us to assign a utility score to each product page-view, and this score can be flexibly further aggregated to a variety of units of interest, such as searches and listings. We provide multiple real-world applications of attribution to illustrate its versatility.

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