Modeling Temporal Bias of Uplift Events in Recommender Systems

  • Basmah Altaf

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

Today, commercial industry spends huge amount of resources in advertisement campaigns, new marketing strategies, and promotional deals to introduce their product to public and attract a large number of customers. These massive investments by a company are worthwhile because marketing tactics greatly influence the consumer behavior. Alternatively, these advertising campaigns have a discernible impact on recommendation systems which tend to promote popular items by ranking them at the top, resulting in biased and unfair decision making and loss of customers’ trust. The biasing impact of popularity of items on recommendations, however, is not fixed, and varies with time. Therefore, it is important to build a bias-aware recommendation system that can rank or predict items based on their true merit at given time frame. This thesis proposes a framework that can model the temporal bias of individual items defined by their characteristic contents, and provides a simple process for bias correction. Bias correction is done either by cleaning the bias from historical training data that is used for building predictive model, or by ignoring the estimated bias from the predictions of a standard predictor. Evaluated on two real world datasets, NetFlix and MovieLens, our framework is shown to be able to estimate and remove the bias as a result of adopted marketing techniques from the predicted popularity of items at a given time.
Date of AwardMay 8 2013
Original languageEnglish (US)
Awarding Institution
  • Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering
SupervisorXiangliang Zhang (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • uplift events
  • bias modeling
  • recommendation systems
  • netflix
  • movie lens

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