English

Neural Fair Collaborative Filtering

Information Retrieval 2020-09-21 v1 Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

A growing proportion of human interactions are digitized on social media platforms and subjected to algorithmic decision-making, and it has become increasingly important to ensure fair treatment from these algorithms. In this work, we investigate gender bias in collaborative-filtering recommender systems trained on social media data. We develop neural fair collaborative filtering (NFCF), a practical framework for mitigating gender bias in recommending sensitive items (e.g. jobs, academic concentrations, or courses of study) using a pre-training and fine-tuning approach to neural collaborative filtering, augmented with bias correction techniques. We show the utility of our methods for gender de-biased career and college major recommendations on the MovieLens dataset and a Facebook dataset, respectively, and achieve better performance and fairer behavior than several state-of-the-art models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.08955,
  title  = {Neural Fair Collaborative Filtering},
  author = {Rashidul Islam and Kamrun Naher Keya and Ziqian Zeng and Shimei Pan and James Foulds},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.08955},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:38:49.978Z