Personalizing Fairness-aware Re-ranking
This work addresses fairness for providers in recommender systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing re-ranking methods with personalization.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring provider-side fairness in personalized recommendation systems by proposing a Fairness-Aware Re-ranking algorithm (FAR) that balances ranking accuracy and provider coverage, with results showing significant fairness promotion and slight accuracy sacrifice while incorporating personalized user tolerance.
Personalized recommendation brings about novel challenges in ensuring fairness, especially in scenarios in which users are not the only stakeholders involved in the recommender system. For example, the system may want to ensure that items from different providers have a fair chance of being recommended. To solve this problem, we propose a Fairness-Aware Re-ranking algorithm (FAR) to balance the ranking quality and provider-side fairness. We iteratively generate the ranking list by trading off between accuracy and the coverage of the providers. Although fair treatment of providers is desirable, users may differ in their receptivity to the addition of this type of diversity. Therefore, personalized user tolerance towards provider diversification is incorporated. Experiments are conducted on both synthetic and real-world data. The results show that our proposed re-ranking algorithm can significantly promote fairness with a slight sacrifice in accuracy and can do so while being attentive to individual user differences.