# Adapting Neural Networks for Uplift Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.00041 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00041/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [End-to-End Cost-Effective Incentive Recommendation under Budget Constraint with Uplift Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11623/) (2024)
- [Robust Uplift Modeling with Large-Scale Contexts for Real-time Marketing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15697/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Uplift is a particular case of individual treatment effect modeling. Such models deal with cause-and-effect inference for a specific factor, such as a marketing intervention. In practice, these models are built on customer data who purchased products or services to improve product marketing. Uplift is estimated using either i) conditional mean regression or ii) transformed outcome regression. Most existing approaches are adaptations of classification and regression trees for the uplift case. However, in practice, these conventional approaches are prone to overfitting. Here we propose a new method using neural networks. This representation allows to jointly optimize the difference in conditional means and the transformed outcome losses. As a consequence, the model not only estimates the uplift, but also ensures consistency in predicting the outcome. We focus on fully randomized experiments, which is the case of our data. We show our proposed method improves the state-of-the-art on synthetic and real data.