A First Look at Selection Bias in Preference Elicitation for Recommendation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Gupta, Shashank, Oosterhuis, Harrie, de Rijke, Maarten
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Gupta, Shashank
Oosterhuis, Harrie
de Rijke, Maarten
author_facet Gupta, Shashank
Oosterhuis, Harrie
de Rijke, Maarten
contents Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in implicit feedback, e.g., clicks, and in some forms of explicit feedback, i.e., ratings on items. Despite the fact that the extreme sparsity of preference elicitation interactions make them severely more prone to selection bias than natural interactions, the effect of selection bias in preference elicitation on the resulting recommendations has not been studied yet. To address this gap, we take a first look at the effects of selection bias in preference elicitation and how they may be further investigated in the future. We find that a big hurdle is the current lack of any publicly available dataset that has preference elicitation interactions. As a solution, we propose a simulation of a topic-based preference elicitation process. The results from our simulation-based experiments indicate (i) that ignoring the effect of selection bias early in preference elicitation can lead to an exacerbation of overrepresentation in subsequent item recommendations, and (ii) that debiasing methods can alleviate this effect, which leads to significant improvements in subsequent item recommendation performance. Our aim is for the proposed simulator and initial results to provide a starting point and motivation for future research into this important but overlooked problem setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_00554
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A First Look at Selection Bias in Preference Elicitation for Recommendation
Gupta, Shashank
Oosterhuis, Harrie
de Rijke, Maarten
Information Retrieval
Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in implicit feedback, e.g., clicks, and in some forms of explicit feedback, i.e., ratings on items. Despite the fact that the extreme sparsity of preference elicitation interactions make them severely more prone to selection bias than natural interactions, the effect of selection bias in preference elicitation on the resulting recommendations has not been studied yet. To address this gap, we take a first look at the effects of selection bias in preference elicitation and how they may be further investigated in the future. We find that a big hurdle is the current lack of any publicly available dataset that has preference elicitation interactions. As a solution, we propose a simulation of a topic-based preference elicitation process. The results from our simulation-based experiments indicate (i) that ignoring the effect of selection bias early in preference elicitation can lead to an exacerbation of overrepresentation in subsequent item recommendations, and (ii) that debiasing methods can alleviate this effect, which leads to significant improvements in subsequent item recommendation performance. Our aim is for the proposed simulator and initial results to provide a starting point and motivation for future research into this important but overlooked problem setting.
title A First Look at Selection Bias in Preference Elicitation for Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00554