AIExplainer
Machine Learning Mathematics Intermediate 2 min read

What is an uplift modeling?

A modeling technique, commonly used in marketing, that models the "causal effect" (also known as the "incremental impact") of a "treatment" on an "individual.

A modeling technique, commonly used in marketing, that models the "causal effect" (also known as the "incremental impact") of a "treatment" on an "individual." Here are two examples: - Doctors might use uplift modeling to predict the mortality decrease (causal effect) of a medical procedure (treatment) depending on the age and medical history of a patient (individual). - Marketers might use uplift modeling to predict the increase in probability of a purchase (causal effect) due to an advertisement (treatment) on a person (individual). Uplift modeling differs from classification or regression in that some labels (for example, half of the labels in binary treatments) are always missing in uplift modeling. For example, a patient can either receive or not receive a treatment; therefore, we can only observe whether the patient is going to heal or not heal in only one of these two situations (but never both). The main advantage of an uplift model is that it can generate predictions for the unobserved situation (the counterfactual) and use it to compute the causal effect.

Practitioners refer to uplift modeling when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.