Timezone: »

 
Spotlight
Quantifying Availability and Discovery in Recommender Systems via Stochastic Reachability
Mihaela Curmei · Sarah Dean · Benjamin Recht

Thu Jul 22 07:25 AM -- 07:30 AM (PDT) @
in Privacy 3 »

In this work, we consider how preference models in interactive recommendation systems determine the availability of content and users' opportunities for discovery. We propose an evaluation procedure based on stochastic reachability to quantify the maximum probability of recommending a target piece of content to an user for a set of allowable strategic modifications. This framework allows us to compute an upper bound on the likelihood of recommendation with minimal assumptions about user behavior. Stochastic reachability can be used to detect biases in the availability of content and diagnose limitations in the opportunities for discovery granted to users. We show that this metric can be computed efficiently as a convex program for a variety of practical settings, and further argue that reachability is not inherently at odds with accuracy. We demonstrate evaluations of recommendation algorithms trained on large datasets of explicit and implicit ratings. Our results illustrate how preference models, selection rules, and user interventions impact reachability and how these effects can be distributed unevenly.

Keywords: Image Segmentation · Applications -> Computer Vision; Applications -> Object Detection; Applications · Visual Scene Analysis and Interpretation; De · Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · Social Aspects of Machine Learning

Author Information

Mihaela Curmei (Berkeley)
Sarah Dean (UC Berkeley)
Benjamin Recht (Berkeley)

Benjamin Recht is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Ben's research group studies the theory and practice of optimization algorithms with a focus on applications in machine learning, data analysis, and controls. Ben is the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2012 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization, the 2014 Jamon Prize, the 2015 William O. Baker Award for Initiatives in Research, and the 2017 NIPS Test of Time Award.

Related Events (a corresponding poster, oral, or spotlight)

More from the Same Authors