Unbiased offline recommender evaluation for missing-not-at-random implicit feedback

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleResearchpeer-review

Implicit-feedback Recommenders (ImplicitRec) leverage positive only user-item interactions, such as clicks, to learn personalized user preferences. Recommenders are often evaluated and compared offline using datasets collected from online platforms. These platforms are subject to popularity bias (i.e., popular items are more likely to be presented and interacted with), and therefore logged ground truth data are Missing-Not-At-Random (MNAR). As a result, the widely used Average-Over-All (AOA) evaluator is biased toward accurately recommending trendy items. In this paper, we (a) investigate evaluation bias of AOA and (b) develop an unbiased and practical offline evaluator for implicit MNAR datasets using the Inverse-Propensity-Scoring (IPS) technique. Through extensive experiments using four real-world datasets and four widely used algorithms, we show that (a) popularity bias is widely manifested in item presentation and interaction; (b) evaluation bias due to MNAR data pervasively exists in most cases where AOA is used to evaluate ImplicitRec; and (c) the unbiased estimator significantly reduces the AOA evaluation bias by more than 30% in the Yahoo! music dataset in terms of the Mean Absolute Error (MAE).

Original languageEnglish
JournalRecSys 2018 - 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
Pages (from-to)279-287
Number of pages9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Sep 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys 2018 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 2 Oct 20187 Oct 2018

Conference

Conference12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys 2018
CountryCanada
CityVancouver
Period02/10/201807/10/2018
SponsorACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

    Research areas

  • Bias, Evaluation, Implicit feedback, Propensity, Recommendation

ID: 301825505