让推荐系统兼顾环保,用碳足迹优化商品推荐。
Towards Carbon Footprint-Aware Recommender Systems for Greener Item Recommendation
- 构建含商品碳足迹的推荐数据集,破解绿色推荐瓶颈。
- 现有推荐算法重准确轻环保,长列表更绿但不准。
- 简单重排策略可平衡准确与环保,通用性强易部署。
在线购物的普及对气候造成前所未有的影响,其排放量堪比大型城市。尽管推荐系统(RecSys)驱动着网购行为,但其在推动可持续选择方面的潜力尚未被充分研究。主要障碍在于缺乏包含商品碳足迹的高质量数据集。本文首次构建了含碳足迹信息的商品数据集,并在此基础上评估传统推荐算法在准确性与可持续性间的权衡。结果表明,为准确率优化的算法往往忽视绿色属性;更长的推荐列表虽更环保但准确率下降。我们提出一种仅需重排即可融合碳足迹的轻量级方法,无需修改模型或重新训练,能显著提升推荐绿色度,且仅轻微牺牲准确率。这一权衡可能反而提升注重环保的用户满意度。本工作为绿色推荐系统研究奠定基础。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The commodity and widespread use of online shopping are having an unprecedented impact on climate, with emission figures from key actors that are easily comparable to those of a large-scale metropolis. Despite online shopping being fueled by recommender systems (RecSys) algorithms, the role and potential of the latter in promoting more sustainable choices is little studied. One of the main reasons for this could be attributed to the lack of a dataset containing carbon footprint emissions for the items. While building such a dataset is a rather challenging task, its presence is pivotal for opening the doors to novel perspectives, evaluations, and methods for RecSys research. In this paper, we target this bottleneck and study the environmental role of RecSys algorithms. First, we mine a dataset that includes carbon footprint emissions for its items. Then, we benchmark conventional RecSys algorithms in terms of accuracy and sustainability as two faces of the same coin. We find that RecSys algorithms optimized for accuracy overlook greenness and that longer recommendation lists are greener but less accurate. Then, we show that a simple reranking approach that accounts for the item's carbon footprint can establish a better trade-off between accuracy and greenness. This reranking approach is modular, ready to use, and can be applied to any RecSys algorithm without the need to alter the underlying mechanisms or retrain models. Our results show that a small sacrifice of accuracy can lead to significant improvements of recommendation greenness across all algorithms and list lengths. Arguably, this accuracy-greenness trade-off could even be seen as an enhancement of user satisfaction, particularly for purpose-driven users who prioritize the environmental impact of their choices. We anticipate this work will serve as the starting point for studying RecSys for more sustainable recommendations.
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