Abstract
There are various biases in recommender systems. Recognizing biases, as well as unfairness caused by problematic biases, is the first
step of system optimization. Related studies on algorithmic biases
are mainly from the perspective of either items or users. For the
latter (we call it “algorithmic user bias”), existing works have considered algorithms’ accuracy performances measured by accuracy
metrics like RMSE. However, algorithmic user biases in beyondaccuracy measurements have rarely been studied, even though
beyond-accuracy oriented recommendation algorithms have been
increasingly investigated, with the purpose of breaking through the
personalization limits of traditional accuracy-oriented algorithms
(such as the typical “filter bubble” phenomenon). To fill in the research gap, in this work, we employ a large-scale survey dataset
collected from a commercial platform, in which more than 11,000
users’ ratings on the recommendation’s 5 performance objectives
(i.e., relevance, diversity, novelty, unexpectedness, and serendipity)
and 8 kinds of user characteristics (i.e., gender, age, big-5 personality traits, and curiosity) are available. We study user biases of
four algorithms (i.e., HOT, Rel-CF, Nov-CF, and Ser-CF) in terms
of those five measurements between user groups of the eight user
characteristics. We further look into users’ behavior patterns like
the preference of using more positive ratings, in order to interpret
the observed biases. Finally, based on the observed algorithmic user
bias and users’ behavior patterns, we analyze the possible factors
leading to the biases and recognize problematic biases that may
lead to unfairness
Description
User Bias in Beyond-Accuracy Measurement of Recommendation Algorithms | Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
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