Title
Popularity-Opportunity Bias in Collaborative Filtering
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis paper connects equal opportunity to popularity bias in implicit recommenders to introduce the problem of popularity-opportunity bias. That is, conditioned on user preferences that a user likes both items, the more popular item is more likely to be recommended (or ranked higher) to the user than the less popular one. This type of bias is harmful, exerting negative effects on the engagement of both users and item providers. Thus, we conduct a three-part study: (i) By a comprehensive empirical study, we identify the existence of the popularity-opportunity bias in fundamental matrix factorization models on four datasets; (ii) coupled with this empirical study, our theoretical study shows that matrix factorization models inherently produce the bias; and (iii) we demonstrate the potential of alleviating this bias by both in-processing and post-processing algorithms. Extensive experiments on four datasets show the effective debiasing performance of these proposed methods compared with baselines designed for conventional popularity bias.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3437963.3441820
WSDM
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
2
0.37
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ziwei Zhu1257.81
Yun He2156.64
Xing Zhao33511.00
Yin Zhang43492281.04
Jianling Wang5437.58
James Caverlee62484145.47