English

Exploring Popularity Bias in Session-based Recommendation

Information Retrieval 2023-12-14 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Existing work has revealed that large-scale offline evaluation of recommender systems for user-item interactions is prone to bias caused by the deployed system itself, as a form of closed loop feedback. Many adopt the \textit{propensity} concept to analyze or mitigate this empirical issue. In this work, we extend the analysis to session-based setup and adapted propensity calculation to the unique characteristics of session-based recommendation tasks. Our experiments incorporate neural models and KNN-based models, and cover both the music and the e-commerce domain. We study the distributions of propensity and different stratification techniques on different datasets and find that propensity-related traits are actually dataset-specific. We then leverage the effect of stratification and achieve promising results compared to the original models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.07855,
  title  = {Exploring Popularity Bias in Session-based Recommendation},
  author = {Haowen Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.07855},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

10pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:49:15.780Z