发现推荐系统中多重偏差加剧热门商品曝光不公,提出简单预处理改善公平性。
The Unfairness of Multifactorial Bias in Recommendation
- 用百分位评分转换做数据预处理,缓解多重偏差影响
- 实验显示曝光公平性提升,精度损失极小
- 适合关注推荐系统公平性的研究者与工程师
流行度偏差和正向评分偏差是推荐系统中两种主要偏差来源,均源于输入数据,经模型传播后导致不公平或次优结果。流行度偏差指少数物品获得大量互动,正向评分偏差则源于高评分值的过度代表。尽管两者各自被广泛研究,其联合效应——即多重偏差——仍缺乏探讨。本文聚焦于物品端公平性,特别是曝光偏差(即物品在推荐结果中的可见性不均)。通过模拟实验发现,正向评分偏差集中在热门物品上,进一步加剧其过度曝光。基于此,我们采用百分位评分转换作为预处理策略以缓解多重偏差。在四个公开数据集上使用六种推荐算法的实验表明,该方法显著提升曝光公平性,且精度损失可忽略。同时,将其集成至后处理公平性流程中,能增强效果并降低计算开销。结果表明,解决多重偏差至关重要,而简单的数据驱动预处理具有实际价值。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Popularity bias and positivity bias are two prominent sources of bias in recommender systems. Both arise from input data, propagate through recommendation models, and lead to unfair or suboptimal outcomes. Popularity bias occurs when a small subset of items receives most interactions, while positivity bias stems from the over-representation of high rating values. Although each bias has been studied independently, their combined effect, to which we refer to as multifactorial bias, remains underexplored. In this work, we examine how multifactorial bias influences item-side fairness, focusing on exposure bias, which reflects the unequal visibility of items in recommendation outputs. Through simulation studies, we find that positivity bias is disproportionately concentrated on popular items, further amplifying their over-exposure. Motivated by this insight, we adapt a percentile-based rating transformation as a pre-processing strategy to mitigate multifactorial bias. Experiments using six recommendation algorithms across four public datasets show that this approach improves exposure fairness with negligible accuracy loss. We also demonstrate that integrating this pre-processing step into post-processing fairness pipelines enhances their effectiveness and efficiency, enabling comparable or better fairness with reduced computational cost. These findings highlight the importance of addressing multifactorial bias and demonstrate the practical value of simple, data-driven pre-processing methods for improving fairness in recommender systems.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。