arXiv:2409.16478cs.IRcs.AI2024-09被引 14

构建模拟框架,研究推荐系统如何长期影响用户偏好。

Algorithmic Drift: A Simulation Framework to Study the Effects of Recommender Systems on User Preferences

  • 用随机模拟框架建模用户与推荐系统的长期互动。
  • 提出新指标,量化推荐系统导致的偏好漂移程度。
  • 适合关注算法社会影响的研究者与平台设计者。

社交媒体和电商等数字平台采用推荐系统为用户提供价值,但其带来的社会影响仍不明确。许多学者认为推荐系统可能加剧偏见,形成算法建议与用户选择之间的反馈循环。然而,推荐系统对用户偏好变化的实际影响程度尚不清晰。因此,有必要在部署前提供一个受控环境评估推荐算法。为此,我们提出一种随机模拟框架,用于模拟长期场景下的用户-推荐系统交互。具体地,通过形式化用户模型,包含用户对算法的抵抗性及对推荐结果的依赖惯性等行为特征。此外,我们引入两个新指标,量化推荐系统在时间维度上对用户偏好的影响。我们在多个合成数据集上进行广泛评估,以检验框架在不同场景和超参数设置下的鲁棒性。实验结果表明,该方法能有效检测并量化用户偏好的漂移。所有代码与数据均公开可用。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Digital platforms such as social media and e-commerce websites adopt Recommender Systems to provide value to the user. However, the social consequences deriving from their adoption are still unclear. Many scholars argue that recommenders may lead to detrimental effects, such as bias-amplification deriving from the feedback loop between algorithmic suggestions and users' choices. Nonetheless, the extent to which recommenders influence changes in users leaning remains uncertain. In this context, it is important to provide a controlled environment for evaluating the recommendation algorithm before deployment. To address this, we propose a stochastic simulation framework that mimics user-recommender system interactions in a long-term scenario. In particular, we simulate the user choices by formalizing a user model, which comprises behavioral aspects, such as the user resistance towards the recommendation algorithm and their inertia in relying on the received suggestions. Additionally, we introduce two novel metrics for quantifying the algorithm's impact on user preferences, specifically in terms of drift over time. We conduct an extensive evaluation on multiple synthetic datasets, aiming at testing the robustness of our framework when considering different scenarios and hyper-parameters setting. The experimental results prove that the proposed methodology is effective in detecting and quantifying the drift over the users preferences by means of the simulation. All the code and data used to perform the experiments are publicly available.

推荐系统用户行为仿真框架偏好漂移

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