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Predictive models are often employed to decide actions in interactive online systems. For example, ads are selectively served to users who are modeled as being inclined to purchase the product being advertised. News feed items are populated based on a model of the user's interests. A common consequence of these predictive models is the creation of a spurious correlation, or confounding, between the action and its desired outcome. In the above examples, the targeted users are likely to buy the product or find the news item regardless of the intervention. This presents a challenge for measuring the true impact of these systems.
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Hill et al. (2015) studied this question.
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