Recommendation Fairness in Social Networks Over Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Cao, Meng, Hussain, Hussain, Sikdar, Sandipan, Helic, Denis, Strohmaier, Markus, Kern, Roman
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Cao, Meng
Hussain, Hussain
Sikdar, Sandipan
Helic, Denis
Strohmaier, Markus
Kern, Roman
author_facet Cao, Meng
Hussain, Hussain
Sikdar, Sandipan
Helic, Denis
Strohmaier, Markus
Kern, Roman
contents In social recommender systems, it is crucial that the recommendation models provide equitable visibility for different demographic groups, such as gender or race. Most existing research has addressed this problem by only studying individual static snapshots of networks that typically change over time. To address this gap, we study the evolution of recommendation fairness over time and its relation to dynamic network properties. We examine three real-world dynamic networks by evaluating the fairness of six recommendation algorithms and analyzing the association between fairness and network properties over time. We further study how interventions on network properties influence fairness by examining counterfactual scenarios with alternative evolution outcomes and differing network properties. Our results on empirical datasets suggest that recommendation fairness improves over time, regardless of the recommendation method. We also find that two network properties, minority ratio, and homophily ratio, exhibit stable correlations with fairness over time. Our counterfactual study further suggests that an extreme homophily ratio potentially contributes to unfair recommendations even with a balanced minority ratio. Our work provides insights into the evolution of fairness within dynamic networks in social science. We believe that our findings will help system operators and policymakers to better comprehend the implications of temporal changes and interventions targeting fairness in social networks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recommendation Fairness in Social Networks Over Time
Cao, Meng
Hussain, Hussain
Sikdar, Sandipan
Helic, Denis
Strohmaier, Markus
Kern, Roman
Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
Information Retrieval
In social recommender systems, it is crucial that the recommendation models provide equitable visibility for different demographic groups, such as gender or race. Most existing research has addressed this problem by only studying individual static snapshots of networks that typically change over time. To address this gap, we study the evolution of recommendation fairness over time and its relation to dynamic network properties. We examine three real-world dynamic networks by evaluating the fairness of six recommendation algorithms and analyzing the association between fairness and network properties over time. We further study how interventions on network properties influence fairness by examining counterfactual scenarios with alternative evolution outcomes and differing network properties. Our results on empirical datasets suggest that recommendation fairness improves over time, regardless of the recommendation method. We also find that two network properties, minority ratio, and homophily ratio, exhibit stable correlations with fairness over time. Our counterfactual study further suggests that an extreme homophily ratio potentially contributes to unfair recommendations even with a balanced minority ratio. Our work provides insights into the evolution of fairness within dynamic networks in social science. We believe that our findings will help system operators and policymakers to better comprehend the implications of temporal changes and interventions targeting fairness in social networks.
title Recommendation Fairness in Social Networks Over Time
topic Social and Information Networks
Computers and Society
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03450