Unit Selection Based on Counterfactual Logic

Ang Li, Judea Pearl

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Main track. Pages 1793-1799.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/248

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Abstract

The unit selection problem aims to identify a set of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, which is defined in counterfactual terms. A typical example is that of selecting individuals who would respond one way if encouraged and a different way if not encouraged. Unlike previous works on this problem, which rely on ad-hoc heuristics, we approach this problem formally, using counterfactual logic, to properly capture the nature of the desired behavior. This formalism enables us to derive an informative selection criterion which integrates experimental and observational data. We demonstrate the superiority of this criterion over A/B-test-based approaches.

Keywords

  • Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change and Causality
  • Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation and Decision ; Utility Theory
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