# Mitigating Hidden Confounding Effects for Causal Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.07499 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07499/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 16 May 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Debiasing Recommendation by Learning Identifiable Latent Confounders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05052/) (2023)
- [Causal Disentanglement for Regulating Social Influence Bias in Social Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03578/) (2024)
- [A Review and Roadmap of Deep Causal Model from Different Causal Structures and Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00923/) (2023)
- [Causal Structure Representation Learning of Confounders in Latent Space for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03382/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Uplift Modeling under Structural Biases: Insights into Metric Stability and Model Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20775/) (2026)
- [Taming Recommendation Bias with Causal Intervention on Evolving Personal Popularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14310/) (2025)
- [BPL: Bias-adaptive Preference Distillation Learning for Recommender System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16076/) (2025)
- [Modeling Endogenous Logic: Causal Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning Model for Explainable Multi-Behavior Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.21335/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recommender systems suffer from confounding biases when there exist confounders affecting both item features and user feedback (e.g., like or not). Existing causal recommendation methods typically assume confounders are fully observed and measured, forgoing the possible existence of hidden confounders in real applications. For instance, product quality is a confounder since affecting both item prices and user ratings, but is hidden for the third-party e-commerce platform due to the difficulty of large-scale quality inspection; ignoring it could result in the bias effect of over-recommending high-price items. This work analyzes and addresses the problem from a causal perspective. The key lies in modeling the causal effect of item features on a user's feedback. To mitigate hidden confounding effects, it is compulsory but challenging to estimate the causal effect without measuring the confounder. Towards this goal, we propose a Hidden Confounder Removal (HCR) framework that leverages front-door adjustment to decompose the causal effect into two partial effects, according to the mediators between item features and user feedback. The partial effects are independent from the hidden confounder and identifiable. During training, HCR performs multi-task learning to infer the partial effects from historical interactions. We instantiate HCR for two scenarios and conduct experiments on three real-world datasets. Empirical results show that the HCR framework provides more accurate recommendations, especially for less-active users. We will release the code once accepted.