2,479 research outputs found
How Algorithmic Confounding in Recommendation Systems Increases Homogeneity and Decreases Utility
Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the
potential to influence product consumption, individuals' perceptions of the
world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or
trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations;
this creates a pernicious feedback loop. Using simulations, we demonstrate how
using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing
utility
Recommender Systems
The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity
of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information.
Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of
communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and
interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical
achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking,
which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments
in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and
evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future
developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to
illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and
future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great
scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of
interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports
Collaborative Deep Learning for Recommender Systems
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a successful approach commonly used by many
recommender systems. Conventional CF-based methods use the ratings given to
items by users as the sole source of information for learning to make
recommendation. However, the ratings are often very sparse in many
applications, causing CF-based methods to degrade significantly in their
recommendation performance. To address this sparsity problem, auxiliary
information such as item content information may be utilized. Collaborative
topic regression (CTR) is an appealing recent method taking this approach which
tightly couples the two components that learn from two different sources of
information. Nevertheless, the latent representation learned by CTR may not be
very effective when the auxiliary information is very sparse. To address this
problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from i.i.d. input to
non-i.i.d. (CF-based) input and propose in this paper a hierarchical Bayesian
model called collaborative deep learning (CDL), which jointly performs deep
representation learning for the content information and collaborative filtering
for the ratings (feedback) matrix. Extensive experiments on three real-world
datasets from different domains show that CDL can significantly advance the
state of the art
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