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Main Authors: Barenji, Samira Vaez, Parajuli, Sushobhan, Ekstrand, Michael D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04518
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author Barenji, Samira Vaez
Parajuli, Sushobhan
Ekstrand, Michael D.
author_facet Barenji, Samira Vaez
Parajuli, Sushobhan
Ekstrand, Michael D.
contents Data is an essential resource for studying recommender systems. While there has been significant work on improving and evaluating state-of-the-art models and measuring various properties of recommender system outputs, less attention has been given to the data itself, particularly how data has changed over time. Such documentation and analysis provide guidance and context for designing and evaluating recommender systems, particularly for evaluation designs making use of time (e.g., temporal splitting). In this paper, we present a temporal explanatory analysis of the UCSD Book Graph dataset scraped from Goodreads, a social reading and recommendation platform active since 2006. We measure the book interaction data using a set of activity, diversity, and fairness metrics; we then train a set of collaborative filtering algorithms on rolling training windows to observe how the same measures evolve over time in the recommendations. Additionally, we explore whether the introduction of algorithmic recommendations in 2011 was followed by observable changes in user or recommender system behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_04518
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle User and Recommender Behavior Over Time: Contextualizing Activity, Effectiveness, Diversity, and Fairness in Book Recommendation
Barenji, Samira Vaez
Parajuli, Sushobhan
Ekstrand, Michael D.
Information Retrieval
Data is an essential resource for studying recommender systems. While there has been significant work on improving and evaluating state-of-the-art models and measuring various properties of recommender system outputs, less attention has been given to the data itself, particularly how data has changed over time. Such documentation and analysis provide guidance and context for designing and evaluating recommender systems, particularly for evaluation designs making use of time (e.g., temporal splitting). In this paper, we present a temporal explanatory analysis of the UCSD Book Graph dataset scraped from Goodreads, a social reading and recommendation platform active since 2006. We measure the book interaction data using a set of activity, diversity, and fairness metrics; we then train a set of collaborative filtering algorithms on rolling training windows to observe how the same measures evolve over time in the recommendations. Additionally, we explore whether the introduction of algorithmic recommendations in 2011 was followed by observable changes in user or recommender system behavior.
title User and Recommender Behavior Over Time: Contextualizing Activity, Effectiveness, Diversity, and Fairness in Book Recommendation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.04518