Path-based summary explanations for graph recommenders (extended version)
This work addresses the need for more comprehensible and useful explanations for users and developers in graph-based recommender systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing path-based explanation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of providing collective insights into graph-based recommendation models by proposing summary explanations that highlight why groups of users receive sets of item recommendations, using efficient graph algorithms like Steiner Tree to reduce complexity while preserving essential information. Evaluations show that these summaries outperform baseline methods in most scenarios across various quality aspects.
Path-based explanations provide intrinsic insights into graph-based recommendation models. However, most previous work has focused on explaining an individual recommendation of an item to a user. In this paper, we propose summary explanations, i.e., explanations that highlight why a user or a group of users receive a set of item recommendations and why an item, or a group of items, is recommended to a set of users as an effective means to provide insights into the collective behavior of the recommender. We also present a novel method to summarize explanations using efficient graph algorithms, specifically the Steiner Tree and the Prize-Collecting Steiner Tree. Our approach reduces the size and complexity of summary explanations while preserving essential information, making explanations more comprehensible for users and more useful to model developers. Evaluations across multiple metrics demonstrate that our summaries outperform baseline explanation methods in most scenarios, in a variety of quality aspects.