In this paper, we consider the Collaborative Ranking (CR) problem for recommendation systems. Given a set of pairwise preferences between items for each user, collaborative ranking can be used to rank un-rated items for each user, and this ranking can be naturally used for recommendation. It is observed that collaborative ranking algorithms usually achieve better performance since they directly minimize the ranking loss; however, they are rarely used in practice due to the poor scalability. All the existing CR algorithms have time complexity at least O(|Ω|r) per iteration, where r is the target rank and |Ω| is number of pairs which grows quadratically with number of ratings per user. For example, the Netflix data contains totally 20 billion rating pairs, and at this scale all the current algorithms have to work with significant subsampling, resulting in poor prediction
on testing data. In this paper, we propose a new collaborative ranking algorithm
called Primal-CR that reduces the time complexity toO(|Ω|+d1d2r), where d1 is number of users and d2 is the averaged number of items rated by a user. Note that d1, d2 is strictly smaller and open much smaller than |Ω|. Furthermore, by exploiting the fact that most data is in the form of numerical ratings instead of pairwise comparisons, we propose
Primal-CR++ with O(d1d2(r + log d2)) time complexity. Both algorithms have better theoretical time complexity than existing approaches and also outperform existing approaches in terms of NDCG and pairwise error on real data sets. To the best of our
knowledge, this is the first collaborative ranking algorithm capable of working on the full Netflix dataset using all the 20 billion rating pairs, and this leads to a model with much better recommendation compared with previous models trained on subsamples.
Finally, compared with classical matrix factorization algorithm which also requires O(d1 d2r) time, our algorithm has almost the same efficiency while making much better recommendations since we consider the ranking loss.
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Exploring author gender in book rating and recommendation
Collaborative filtering algorithms find useful patterns in rating and consumption data and exploit these patterns to guide users to good items. Many of these patterns reflect important real-world phenomena driving interactions between the various users and items; other patterns may be irrelevant or reflect undesired discrimination, such as discrimination in publishing or purchasing against authors who are women or ethnic minorities. In this work, we examine the response of collaborative filtering recommender algorithms to the distribution of their input data with respect to one dimension of social concern, namely content creator gender. Using publicly available book ratings data, we measure the distribution of the genders of the authors of books in user rating profiles and recommendation lists produced from this data. We find that common collaborative filtering algorithms tend to propagate at least some of each user’s tendency to rate or read male or female authors into their resulting recommendations, although they differ in both the strength of this propagation and the variance in the gender balance of the recommendation lists they produce. The data, experimental design, and statistical methods are designed to be reusable for studying potentially discriminatory social dimensions of recommendations in other domains and settings as well.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751278
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10218853
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction
- ISSN:
- 0924-1868
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2
