Impacts of Mainstream-Driven Algorithms on Recommendations for Children Across Domains: A Reproducibility Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ungruh, Robin, Bellogín, Alejandro, Kowald, Dominik, Pera, Maria Soledad
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ungruh, Robin
Bellogín, Alejandro
Kowald, Dominik
Pera, Maria Soledad
author_facet Ungruh, Robin
Bellogín, Alejandro
Kowald, Dominik
Pera, Maria Soledad
contents Children are often exposed to items curated by recommendation algorithms. Yet, research seldom considers children as a user group, and when it does, it is anchored on datasets where children are underrepresented, risking overlooking their interests, favoring those of the majority, i.e., mainstream users. Recently, Ungruh et al. demonstrated that children's consumption patterns and preferences differ from those of mainstream users, resulting in inconsistent recommendation algorithm performance and behavior for this user group. These findings, however, are based on two datasets with a limited child user sample. We reproduce and replicate this study on a wider range of datasets in the movie, music, and book domains, uncovering interaction patterns and aspects of child-recommender interactions consistent across domains, as well as those specific to some user samples in the data. We also extend insights from the original study with popularity bias metrics, given the interpretation of results from the original study. With this reproduction and extension, we uncover consumption patterns and differences between age groups stemming from intrinsic differences between children and others, and those unique to specific datasets or domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_06596
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Impacts of Mainstream-Driven Algorithms on Recommendations for Children Across Domains: A Reproducibility Study
Ungruh, Robin
Bellogín, Alejandro
Kowald, Dominik
Pera, Maria Soledad
Information Retrieval
Children are often exposed to items curated by recommendation algorithms. Yet, research seldom considers children as a user group, and when it does, it is anchored on datasets where children are underrepresented, risking overlooking their interests, favoring those of the majority, i.e., mainstream users. Recently, Ungruh et al. demonstrated that children's consumption patterns and preferences differ from those of mainstream users, resulting in inconsistent recommendation algorithm performance and behavior for this user group. These findings, however, are based on two datasets with a limited child user sample. We reproduce and replicate this study on a wider range of datasets in the movie, music, and book domains, uncovering interaction patterns and aspects of child-recommender interactions consistent across domains, as well as those specific to some user samples in the data. We also extend insights from the original study with popularity bias metrics, given the interpretation of results from the original study. With this reproduction and extension, we uncover consumption patterns and differences between age groups stemming from intrinsic differences between children and others, and those unique to specific datasets or domains.
title Impacts of Mainstream-Driven Algorithms on Recommendations for Children Across Domains: A Reproducibility Study
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06596