skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Data Generation via Latent Factor Simulation for Fairness-aware Re-ranking
Synthetic data is a useful resource for algorithmic research. It allows for the evaluation of systems under a range of conditions that might be difficult to achieve in real world settings. In recommender systems, the use of synthetic data is somewhat limited; some work has concentrated on building user-item interaction data at large scale. We believe that fairness-aware recommendation research can benefit from simulated data as it allows the study of protected groups and their interactions without depending on sensitive data that needs privacy protection. In this paper, we propose a novel type of data for fairness-aware recommendation: synthetic recommender system outputs that can be used to study re-ranking algorithms.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2107505
PAR ID:
10546036
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
FAccTRec 2024 Workshop on Responsible Recommendation
Date Published:
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; (, UMAP '21: Proceedings Of The 29th ACM Conference On User Modeling, Adaptation And Personalization)
    null (Ed.)
    Though recommender systems are defined by personalization, recent work has shown the importance of additional, beyond-accuracy objectives, such as fairness. Because users often expect their recommendations to be purely personalized, these new algorithmic objectives must be communicated transparently in a fairness-aware recommender system. While explanation has a long history in recommender systems research, there has been little work that attempts to explain systems that use a fairness objective. Even though the previous work in other branches of AI has explored the use of explanations as a tool to increase fairness, this work has not been focused on recommendation. Here, we consider user perspectives of fairness-aware recommender systems and techniques for enhancing their transparency. We describe the results of an exploratory interview study that investigates user perceptions of fairness, recommender systems, and fairness-aware objectives. We propose three features – informed by the needs of our participants – that could improve user understanding of and trust in fairness-aware recommender systems. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency)
    The field of machine learning fairness has developed metrics, methodologies, and data sets for experimenting with classification algorithms. However, equivalent research is lacking in the area of personalized recommender systems. This 180-minute hands-on tutorial will introduce participants to concepts in fairness-aware recommendation, and metrics and methodologies in evaluating recommendation fairness. Participants will also gain hands-on experience with conducting fairness-aware recommendation experiments with the LibRec recommendation system using the librec-auto scripting platform, and learn the steps required to configure their own experiments, incorporate their own data sets, and design their own algorithms and metrics. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology)
    As one of the most pervasive applications of machine learning, recommender systems are playing an important role on assisting human decision making. The satisfaction of users and the interests of platforms are closely related to the quality of the generated recommendation results. However, as a highly data-driven system, recommender system could be affected by data or algorithmic bias and thus generate unfair results, which could weaken the reliance of the systems. As a result, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems in recommendation settings. Recently, there has been growing attention on fairness considerations in recommender systems with more and more literature on approaches to promote fairness in recommendation. However, the studies are rather fragmented and lack a systematic organization, thus making it difficult to penetrate for new researchers to the domain. This motivates us to provide a systematic survey of existing works on fairness in recommendation. This survey focuses on the foundations for fairness in recommendation literature. It first presents a brief introduction about fairness in basic machine learning tasks such as classification and ranking in order to provide a general overview of fairness research, as well as introduce the more complex situations and challenges that need to be considered when studying fairness in recommender systems. After that, the survey will introduce fairness in recommendation with a focus on the taxonomies of current fairness definitions, the typical techniques for improving fairness, as well as the datasets for fairness studies in recommendation. The survey also talks about the challenges and opportunities in fairness research with the hope of promoting the fair recommendation research area and beyond. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management)
    Tensor-based methods have shown promise in improving upon traditional matrix factorization methods for recommender systems. But tensors may achieve improved recommendation quality while worsening the fairness of the recommendations. Hence, we propose a novel fairness-aware tensor recommendation framework that is designed to maintain quality while dramatically improving fairness. Four key aspects of the proposed framework are: (i) a new sensitive latent factor matrix for isolating sensitive features; (ii) a sensitive information regularizer that extracts sensitive information which can taint other latent factors; (iii) an effective algorithm to solve the proposed optimization model; and (iv) extension to multi-feature and multi-category cases which previous efforts have not addressed. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that the framework enhances recommendation fairness while preserving recommendation quality in comparison with state-of-the-art alternatives. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, RecSys '20: Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems)
    null (Ed.)
    Comparative experimentation is important for studying reproducibility in recommender systems. This is particularly true in areas without well-established methodologies, such as fairness-aware recommendation. In this paper, we describe fairness-aware enhancements to our recommender systems experimentation tool librec-auto. These enhancements include metrics for various classes of fairness definitions, extension of the experimental model to support result re-ranking and a library of associated re-ranking algorithms, and additional support for experiment automation and reporting. The associated demo will help attendees move quickly to configuring and running their own experiments with librec-auto. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email