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Poster

Rethinking Causal Ranking: A Balanced Perspective on Uplift Model Evaluation

Minqin Zhu · Zexu Sun · Ruoxuan Xiong · Anpeng Wu · Baohong Li · Caizhi Tang · JUN ZHOU · Fei Wu · Kun Kuang

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Thu 17 Jul 11 a.m. PDT — 1:30 p.m. PDT

Abstract:

Uplift modeling is crucial for identifying individuals likely to respond to a treatment in applications like marketing and customer retention, but evaluating these models is challenging due to the inaccessibility of counterfactual outcomes in real-world settings.In this paper, we identify a fundamental limitation in existing evaluation metrics, such as the uplift and Qini curves, which fail to rank individuals with negative outcomes accurately.This can lead to biased evaluations, where biased models receive higher curve values than unbiased ones, resulting in suboptimal model selection.To address this, we propose the Principled Uplift Curve (PUC), a novel evaluation metric that assigns equal curve values of individuals with both positive and negative outcomes, offering a more balanced and unbiased assessment. We then derive the Principled Uplift Loss (PUL) function from the PUC and integrate it into a new uplift model, the Principled Treatment and Outcome Network (PTONet), to reduce bias during uplift model training.Experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that the PUC provides less biased evaluations, while PTONet outperforms existing methods.

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