System, method, and non-transitory machine-readable information storage medium for recommendations of items and controlling an associated bias thereof

Abstract

Recommender Systems (RS) tend to recommend more popular items instead of the relevant long-tail items. Mitigating such popularity bias is crucial to ensure that less popular but relevant items are recommended. System described herein analyses popularity bias in session-based RS obtained via deep learning (DL) models. DL models trained on historical user-item interactions in session logs (having long-tailed item-click distributions) tend to amplify popularity bias. To understand source of this bias amplification, potential sources of bias at data-generation stage (user-item interactions captured as session logs) and model training stage are considered by the system for recommendation wherein popularity of item has causal effect on user-item interactions via conformity bias, and item ranking from models via biased training process due to class imbalance. While most existing approaches address only one of these effects, a comprehensive causal inference framework is implemented by present disclosure that identifies and mitigates effects at both stages.