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Measuring Recency Bias In Sequential Recommendation Systems

Information Retrieval 2024-09-17 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Recency bias in a sequential recommendation system refers to the overly high emphasis placed on recent items within a user session. This bias can diminish the serendipity of recommendations and hinder the system's ability to capture users' long-term interests, leading to user disengagement. We propose a simple yet effective novel metric specifically designed to quantify recency bias. Our findings also demonstrate that high recency bias measured in our proposed metric adversely impacts recommendation performance too, and mitigating it results in improved recommendation performances across all models evaluated in our experiments, thus highlighting the importance of measuring recency bias.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.09722,
  title  = {Measuring Recency Bias In Sequential Recommendation Systems},
  author = {Jeonglyul Oh and Sungzoon Cho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.09722},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted at the CONSEQUENCES '24 workshop, co-located with ACM RecSys '24

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:45:10.789Z