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Overcoming Diverse Undesired Effects in Recommender Systems: A Deontological Approach

Published: 27 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

In today’s digital landscape, recommender systems have gained ubiquity as a means of directing users toward personalized products, services, and content. However, despite their widespread adoption and a long track of research, these systems are not immune to shortcomings. A significant challenge faced by recommender systems is the presence of biases, which produces various undesirable effects, prominently the popularity bias. This bias hampers the diversity of recommended items, thus restricting users’ exposure to less popular or niche content. Furthermore, this issue is compounded when multiple stakeholders are considered, requiring the balance of multiple, potentially conflicting objectives.
In this article, we present a new approach to address a wide range of undesired consequences in recommender systems that involve various stakeholders. Instead of adopting a consequentialist perspective that aims to mitigate the repercussions of a recommendation policy, we propose a deontological approach centered around a minimal set of ethical principles. More precisely, we introduce two distinct principles aimed at avoiding overconfidence in predictions and accurately modeling the genuine interests of users. The proposed approach circumvents the need for defining a multi-objective system, which has been identified as one of the main limitations when developing complex recommenders. Through extensive experimentation, we show the efficacy of our approach in mitigating the adverse impact of the recommender from both user and item perspectives, ultimately enhancing various beyond accuracy metrics. This study underscores the significance of responsible and equitable recommendations and proposes a strategy that can be easily deployed in real-world scenarios.

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  • (2024)iHSPRec: Image Enhanced Historical Sequential Pattern RecommendationProceedings of the 2024 8th International Conference on Information System and Data Mining10.1145/3686397.3686411(79-89)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Deontology and safe artificial intelligencePhilosophical Studies10.1007/s11098-024-02174-yOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024

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cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 15, Issue 4
August 2024
563 pages
EISSN:2157-6912
DOI:10.1145/3613644
  • Editor:
  • Huan Liu
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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 27 July 2024
Online AM: 01 February 2024
Accepted: 02 January 2024
Revised: 22 December 2023
Received: 03 July 2023
Published in TIST Volume 15, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Recommender systems
  2. uncertainty
  3. beyond accuracy metrics
  4. fairness
  5. diversity

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  • Government of Catalonia’s Agency for Business Competitiveness (ACCIÓ) under Project PICAE (Comunitat RIS3Cat Media)
  • Generalitat de Catalunya
  • Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación

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  • (2024)iHSPRec: Image Enhanced Historical Sequential Pattern RecommendationProceedings of the 2024 8th International Conference on Information System and Data Mining10.1145/3686397.3686411(79-89)Online publication date: 24-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Deontology and safe artificial intelligencePhilosophical Studies10.1007/s11098-024-02174-yOnline publication date: 13-Jun-2024

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