Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
5-2019
Department
Computer Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract
Recommender Systems (RSs) are widely used to help online users discover products, books, news, music, movies, courses, restaurants,etc. Because a traditional recommendation strategy always shows the most relevant items (thus with highest predicted rating), traditional RS’s are expected to make popular items become even more popular and non-popular items become even less popular which in turn further divides the haves (popular) from the have-nots (un-popular). Therefore, a major problem with RSs is that they may introduce biases affecting the exposure of items, thus creating a popularity divide of items during the feedback loop that occurs with users, and this may lead the RS to make increasingly biased recommendations over time. In this paper, we view the RS environment as a chain of events that are the result of interactions between users and the RS. Based on that, we propose several debiasing algorithms during this chain of events, and evaluate how these algorithms impact the predictive behavior of the RS, as well as trends in the popularity distribution of items over time. We also propose a novel blind-spot-aware matrix factorization (MF) algorithm to debias the RS. Results show that propensity matrix factorization achieved a certain level of debiasing of the RS while active learning combined with the propensity MF achieved a higher debiasing effect on recommendations.
Original Publication Information
Wenlong Sun, Sami Khenissi, Olfa Nasraoui, and Patrick Shafto. "Debiasing the Human-Recommender System Feedback Loop in Collaborative Filtering." 2019. Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 645–651.
ThinkIR Citation
Sun, Wenlong; Khenissi, Sami; Nasraoui, Olfa; and Shafto, Patrick, "Debiasing the Human-Recommender System Feedback Loop in Collaborative Filtering" (2019). Faculty and Staff Scholarship. 431.
https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/431
DOI
10.1145/3308560.3317303
ORCID
0000-0003-0999-5385
Comments
This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution. WWW ’19 Companion, May 13–17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA
©2019 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6675-5/19/05.