Causal Inference via Sparse Additive Models with Application to Online Advertising

Advertising effectiveness measurement is a fundamental problem in online advertising. Various causal inference methods have been employed to measure the causal effects of ad treatments. However, existing methods mainly focus on linear logistic regression for univariate and binary treatments and are not well suited for complex ad treatments of multi-dimensions, where each dimension could be discrete or continuous. In this paper we propose a novel two-stage causal inference framework for assessing the impact of complex ad treatments. In the first stage, we estimate the propensity parameter via a sparse additive model; in the second stage, a propensity-adjusted regression model is applied for measuring the treatment effect. Our approach is shown to provide an unbiased estimation of the ad effectiveness under regularity conditions. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we apply it to a real online advertising campaign to evaluate the impact of three ad treatments: ad frequency, a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Wei Sun, Pengyuan Wang, Dawei Yin, Jian Yang, Yi Chang
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents