Degenerate Feedback Loops in Recommender Systems

Machine learning is used extensively in recommender systems deployed in products. The decisions made by these systems can influence user beliefs and preferences which in turn affect the feedback the learning system receives - thus creating a feedback loop. This phenomenon can give rise to the so-called "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" that have user and societal implications. In this paper, we provide a novel theoretical analysis that examines both the role of user dynamics and the behavior of recommender systems, disentangling the echo chamber from the filter bubble effect. In addition, we offer practical solutions to slow down system degeneracy. Our study contributes toward understanding and developing solutions to commonly cited issues in the complex temporal scenario, an area that is still largely unexplored

TSCMF: Temporal and social collective matrix factorization model for recommender systems

In real-world recommender systems, user preferences are dynamic and typically change over time. Capturing the temporal dynamics of user preferences is essential to design an efficient personalized recommender system and has recently attracted significant attention. In this paper, we consider user preferences change individually over time. Moreover, based on the intuition that social influence can affect the users’ preferences in a recommender system, we propose a Temporal and Social CollectiveMatrix Factorization model called TSCMF for recommendation.We jointly factorize the users’ rating information and social trust information in a collective matrix factorization framework by introducing a joint objective function. We model user dynamics into this framework by learning a transition matrix of user preferences between two successive time periods for each individual user. We present an efficient optimization algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent for solving the objective function. The experiments on a real-world dataset illustrate that the proposed model outperforms the competitive methods.Moreover, the complexity analysis demonstrates that the proposed model can be scaled up to large datasets

From Amateurs to Connoisseurs: Modeling the Evolution of User Expertise through Online Reviews

Recommending products to consumers means not only understanding their tastes, but also understanding their level of experience. For example, it would be a mistake to recommend the iconic film Seven Samurai simply because a user enjoys other action movies; rather, we might conclude that they will eventually enjoy it -- once they are ready. The same is true for beers, wines, gourmet foods -- or any products where users have acquired tastes: the `best' products may not be the most `accessible'. Thus our goal in this paper is to recommend products that a user will enjoy now, while acknowledging that their tastes may have changed over time, and may change again in the future. We model how tastes change due to the very act of consuming more products -- in other words, as users become more experienced. We develop a latent factor recommendation system that explicitly accounts for each user's level of experience. We find that such a model not only leads to better recommendations, but also allows us to study the role of user experience and expertise on a novel dataset of fifteen million beer, wine, food, and movie reviews.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

The Method of Constructing Recommendations Online on the Temporal Dynamics of User Interests Using Multilayer Graph

The problem of the online construction of a rating list of objects in the recommender system is considered. A method for constructing recommendations online using the presentation of input data in the form of a multi-layer graph based on changes in user interests over time is proposed. The method is used for constructing recommendations in a situation with implicit feedback from the user. Input data are represented by a sequence of user choice records with a time stamp for each choice. The method includes the phases of pre-filtering of data and building recommendations by collaborative filtering of selected data. At pre-filtering of the input data, the subset of data is split into a sequence of fixed-length non-overlapping time intervals. Users with similar interests and records with objects of interest to these users are selected on a finite continuous subset of time intervals. In the second phase, the pre-filtered subset of data is used, which allows reducing the computational costs of generating recommendations. The method allows increasing the efficiency of building a rating list offered to the target user by taking into account changes in the interests of the user over time