Mehdi Elahi

Anastasiia Klimashevskaia, Dietmar Jannach, Mehdi Elahi et al.

Recommender systems help people find relevant content in a personalized way. One main promise of such systems is that they are able to increase the visibility of items in the long tail, i.e., the lesser-known items in a catalogue. Existing research, however, suggests that in many situations todays recommendation algorithms instead exhibit a popularity bias, meaning that they often focus on rather popular items in their recommendations. Such a bias may not only lead to the limited value of the recommendations for consumers and providers in the short run, but it may also cause undesired reinforcement effects over time. In this paper, we discuss the potential reasons for popularity bias and review existing approaches to detect, quantify and mitigate popularity bias in recommender systems. Our survey, therefore, includes both an overview of the computational metrics used in the literature as well as a review of the main technical approaches to reduce the bias. Furthermore, we critically discuss todays literature, where we observe that the research is almost entirely based on computational experiments and on certain assumptions regarding the practical effects of including long-tail items in the recommendations.

Nasim Sonboli, Sipei Li, Mehdi Elahi et al.

General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) aim to safeguard individuals' personal information from harm. While full compliance is mandatory in the European Union and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), it is not in other places. GDPR requires simultaneous compliance with all the principles such as fairness, accuracy, and data minimization. However, it overlooks the potential contradictions within its principles. This matter gets even more complex when compliance is required from decision-making systems. Therefore, it is essential to investigate the feasibility of simultaneously achieving the goals of GDPR and machine learning, and the potential tradeoffs that might be forced upon us. This paper studies the relationship between the principles of data minimization and fairness in recommender systems. We operationalize data minimization via active learning (AL) because, unlike many other methods, it can preserve a high accuracy while allowing for strategic data collection, hence minimizing the amount of data collection. We have implemented several active learning strategies (personalized and non-personalized) and conducted a comparative analysis focusing on accuracy and fairness on two publicly available datasets. The results demonstrate that different AL strategies may have different impacts on the accuracy of recommender systems with nearly all strategies negatively impacting fairness. There has been no to very limited work on the trade-off between data minimization and fairness, the pros and cons of active learning methods as tools for implementing data minimization, and the potential impacts of AL on fairness. By exploring these critical aspects, we offer valuable insights for developing recommender systems that are GDPR compliant.

Yashar Deldjoo, Massimo Quadrana, Mehdi Elahi et al.

Item features play an important role in movie recommender systems, where recommendations can be generated by using explicit or implicit preferences of users on traditional features (attributes) such as tag, genre, and cast. Typically, movie features are human-generated, either editorially (e.g., genre and cast) or by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd (e.g., tag), and as such, they are prone to noise and are expensive to collect. Moreover, these features are often rare or absent for new items, making it difficult or even impossible to provide good quality recommendations. In this paper, we show that user's preferences on movies can be better described in terms of the mise-en-scène features, i.e., the visual aspects of a movie that characterize design, aesthetics and style (e.g., colors, textures). We use both MPEG-7 visual descriptors and Deep Learning hidden layers as example of mise-en-scène features that can visually describe movies. Interestingly, mise-en-scène features can be computed automatically from video files or even from trailers, offering more flexibility in handling new items, avoiding the need for costly and error-prone human-based tagging, and providing good scalability. We have conducted a set of experiments on a large catalogue of 4K movies. Results show that recommendations based on mise-en-scène features consistently provide the best performance with respect to richer sets of more traditional features, such as genre and tag.

Roberto Pagano, Massimo Quadrana, Mehdi Elahi et al.

One of the main challenges in Recommender Systems (RSs) is the New User problem which happens when the system has to generate personalised recommendations for a new user whom the system has no information about. Active Learning tries to solve this problem by acquiring user preference data with the maximum quality, and with the minimum acquisition cost. Although there are variety of works in active learning for RSs research area, almost all of them have focused only on the single-domain recommendation scenario. However, several real-world RSs operate in the cross-domain scenario, where the system generates recommendations in the target domain by exploiting user preferences in both the target and auxiliary domains. In such a scenario, the performance of active learning strategies can be significantly influenced and typical active learning strategies may fail to perform properly. In this paper, we address this limitation, by evaluating active learning strategies in a novel evaluation framework, explicitly suited for the cross-domain recommendation scenario. We show that having access to the preferences of the users in the auxiliary domain may have a huge impact on the performance of active learning strategies w.r.t. the classical, single-domain scenario.