A bias study and an unbiased deep neural network for recommender systems

Article type: Research Article

Authors: He, Li^a | Zhao, Jiashu^{b; *} | Gu, Yulong^c | Elbaz, Mitchell^b | Ding, Zhuoye^a

Affiliations: [a] JD.com, China | [b] Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada | [c] Bytedance, China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: User feedback data (e.g., clicks, dwell time in the product detail page) have been incorporated in the training process of many ranking models for better performance. Such approaches are widely used in many ranking applications, including search and recommendation. Recently, the inherent biases in user feedback data have been studied, which indicates how the users’ behaviors can be affected by factors other than relevancy. By identifying and removing these biases, the ranking models can be further improved. Researchers have developed a variety of debiasing methods on different bias factors. Most of them only focus on one type of bias and pay little attention to different types of bias from a unified perspective. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study of bias focusing on the application of ranking problems in recommender systems which is highly important for the research of web intelligence. Then, we share our experiences derived from designing and optimizing unbiased models to improve feeds recommendation. To uncover the effects of biases and achieve better ranking performance, we propose several unbiased models and compare with state-of-the-art models. We conduct extensive offline experiments on real datasets and validate the effectiveness of our method by performing online A/B testing in a real-world recommender system.

Keywords: Bias study, unbiased learning to rank, recommender systems, neural network

DOI: 10.3233/WEB-230036

Journal: Web Intelligence, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 15-29, 2024