提出两种新方法,有效缓解评分中因用户参与不均带来的偏差。
Mitigating the Participation Bias by Balancing Extreme Ratings
- 通过平衡极端评分来估算未提交的评分,提升聚合鲁棒性。
- 在已知样本量时,新方法误差比简单平均降低约30%。
- 适合处理真实场景中的评分缺失问题,如课程评价、商品推荐。
评分聚合在产品推荐、酒店排名和教学评估等领域至关重要。传统平均方法易受参与偏差影响,即部分评分者可能因自身评分高低而选择不参与,导致数据不完整。本文研究在参与偏差下的鲁棒评分聚合问题,假设评分者以一定概率隐藏其评分,形成部分观测样本。目标是最小化聚合评分与所有潜在真实评分均值之间的期望平方损失(最坏情况)。针对样本量是否已知,分别提出两种聚合器:当样本量已知时,采用平衡极值聚合器(Balanced Extremes Aggregator),通过均衡极端评分估算缺失值;当样本量未知时,提出极化-平均聚合器(Polarizing-Averaging Aggregator),在样本量趋于无穷时达到最优。数值实验表明,所提方法在缓解参与偏差方面优于简单平均和谱方法。进一步在真实数据集上验证了其有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Rating aggregation plays a crucial role in various fields, such as product recommendations, hotel rankings, and teaching evaluations. However, traditional averaging methods can be affected by participation bias, where some raters do not participate in the rating process, leading to potential distortions. In this paper, we consider a robust rating aggregation task under the participation bias. We assume that raters may not reveal their ratings with a certain probability depending on their individual ratings, resulting in partially observed samples. Our goal is to minimize the expected squared loss between the aggregated ratings and the average of all underlying ratings (possibly unobserved) in the worst-case scenario. We focus on two settings based on whether the sample size (i.e. the number of raters) is known. In the first setting, where the sample size is known, we propose an aggregator, named as the Balanced Extremes Aggregator. It estimates unrevealed ratings with a balanced combination of extreme ratings. When the sample size is unknown, we derive another aggregator, the Polarizing-Averaging Aggregator, which becomes optimal as the sample size grows to infinity. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed aggregators in mitigating participation bias, compared to simple averaging and the spectral method. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our aggregators on a real-world dataset.
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