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Rating Distribution Calibration for Selection Bias Mitigation in Recommendations

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Real-world recommendation datasets have been shown to be subject to selection bias, which can challenge recommendation models to learn real preferences of users, so as to make accurate recommendations. Existing approaches to mitigate selection bias, such as data imputation and inverse propensity score, are sensitive to the quality of the additional imputation or propensity estimation models. To break these limitations, in this work, we propose a novel self-supervised learning (SSL) framework, i.e., Rating Distribution Calibration (RDC), to tackle selection bias without introducing additional models. In addition to the original training objective, we introduce a rating distribution calibration loss. It aims to correct the predicted rating distribution of biased users by taking advantage of that of their similar unbiased users. We empirically evaluate RDC on two real-world datasets and one synthetic dataset. The experimental results show that RDC outperforms the original model as well as the state-of-the-art debiasing approaches by a significant margin.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Multi-teacher knowledge distillation for debiasing recommendation with uniform dataExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2025.126808273(126808)Online publication date: May-2025
  • (2024)Enhancing User-Item Interaction Through Counterfactual Classifier For Sequential RecommendationApplied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences10.2478/amns-2024-24819:1Online publication date: 3-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Towards a Causal Decision-Making Framework for Recommender SystemsACM Transactions on Recommender Systems10.1145/36291692:2(1-34)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
  • Show More Cited By

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
            April 2022
            3764 pages
            ISBN:9781450390965
            DOI:10.1145/3485447
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            Publication History

            Published: 25 April 2022

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            Author Tags

            1. recommendation system
            2. self-supervised learning
            3. unbiased recommendation

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            WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
            April 25 - 29, 2022
            Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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            Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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            Cited By

            View all
            • (2025)Multi-teacher knowledge distillation for debiasing recommendation with uniform dataExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2025.126808273(126808)Online publication date: May-2025
            • (2024)Enhancing User-Item Interaction Through Counterfactual Classifier For Sequential RecommendationApplied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences10.2478/amns-2024-24819:1Online publication date: 3-Sep-2024
            • (2024)Towards a Causal Decision-Making Framework for Recommender SystemsACM Transactions on Recommender Systems10.1145/36291692:2(1-34)Online publication date: 14-May-2024
            • (2024)DDPO: Direct Dual Propensity Optimization for Post-Click Conversion Rate EstimationProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657817(1179-1188)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
            • (2024)A Novel Shadow Variable Catcher for Addressing Selection Bias in Recommendation Systems2024 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)10.1109/ICDM59182.2024.00014(71-80)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
            • (2024)Uncovering the Propensity Identification Problem in Debiased Recommendations2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE)10.1109/ICDE60146.2024.00056(653-666)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
            • (2023)Debiasing Recommendation by Learning Identifiable Latent ConfoundersProceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3580305.3599296(3353-3363)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2023
            • (2023)CounterCLR: Counterfactual Contrastive Learning with Non-random Missing Data in Recommendation2023 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)10.1109/ICDM58522.2023.00174(1355-1360)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2023
            • (2023)A survey on fairness-aware recommender systemsInformation Fusion10.1016/j.inffus.2023.101906100:COnline publication date: 1-Dec-2023

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