Modeling mutual feedback between users and recommender systems

DOI10.1088/1742-5468/2015/07/P07020MaRDI QIDQ3302344zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors An Zeng, C. H. Yeung, Matúš Medo, Yi-Cheng Zhang

Publication date 11 August 2020

Published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01672

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Internet topics (68M11) Computing methodologies for information systems (hypertext navigation, interfaces, decision support, etc.) (68U35) Social networks; opinion dynamics (91D30)

Abstract: Recommender systems daily influence our decisions on the Internet. While considerable attention has been given to issues such as recommendation accuracy and user privacy, the long-term mutual feedback between a recommender system and the decisions of its users has been neglected so far. We propose here a model of network evolution which allows us to study the complex dynamics induced by this feedback, including the hysteresis effect which is typical for systems with non-linear dynamics. Despite the popular belief that recommendation helps users to discover new things, we find that the long-term use of recommendation can contribute to the rise of extremely popular items and thus ultimately narrow the user choice. These results are supported by measurements of the time evolution of item popularity inequality in real systems. We show that this adverse effect of recommendation can be tamed by sacrificing part of short-term recommendation accuracy.

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Cites work

• E-commerce recommendation applications

Cited in

(6)

• Long-term effects of user preference-oriented recommendation method on the evolution of online system
• Recovering Markov models from closed-loop data
• Ranking in evolving complex networks
• Do recommender systems benefit users? A modeling approach
• Preferential attachment, aging and weights in recommendation systems
• Recommender systems as mechanisms for social learning

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