Abstract
While recommender systems are highly successful at helping users find relevant information online, they may also exhibit a certain undesired bias of mostly promoting only already popular items. Various approaches of quantifying and mitigating such biases were put forward in the literature. Most recently, calibration methods were proposed that aim to match the popularity of the recommended items with popularity preferences of individual users. In this paper, we show that while such methods are efficient in avoiding the recommendation of too popular items for some users, other techniques may be more effective in reducing the popularity bias on the platform level. Overall, our work highlights that in practice choices regarding metrics and algorithms have to be made with caution to ensure the desired effects.
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Notes
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- 2.
Differently from [2], we used the MovieLens dataset with about 100k ratings by 943 users on 1612 items of in our experiments.
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Interestingly, in [2], CP was favorable over XQ also on the ARP measure. We could not reproduce this finding for both datasets. Unfortunately, the authors of [2] could not reproduce the code of the CP method. The observed discrepancy might therefore be both related to dataset characteristics and differences in the implementation.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by industry partners and the Research Council of Norway with funding to MediaFutures: Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, through The Centres for Research-based Innovation scheme, project number 309339.
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Klimashevskaia, A., Elahi, M., Jannach, D., Trattner, C., Skjærven, L. (2022). Mitigating Popularity Bias in Recommendation: Potential and Limits of Calibration Approaches. In: Boratto, L., Faralli, S., Marras, M., Stilo, G. (eds) Advances in Bias and Fairness in Information Retrieval. BIAS 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1610. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09316-6_8
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