Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.1145/3604915.3608809acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesrecsysConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

What We Evaluate When We Evaluate Recommender Systems: Understanding Recommender Systems’ Performance using Item Response Theory

Published: 14 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Current practices in offline evaluation use rank-based metrics to measure the quality of top-n recommendation lists. This approach has practical benefits as it centres assessment on the output of the recommender system and, therefore, measures performance from the perspective of end-users. However, this methodology neglects how recommender systems more broadly model user preferences, which is not captured by only considering the top-n recommendations. In this article, we use item response theory (IRT), a family of latent variable models used in psychometric assessment, to gain a comprehensive understanding of offline evaluation. We use IRT to jointly estimate the latent abilities of 51 recommendation algorithms and the characteristics of 3 commonly used benchmark data sets. For all data sets, the latent abilities estimated by IRT suggest that higher scores from traditional rank-based metrics do not reflect improvements in modeling user preferences. Furthermore, we show that the top-n recommendations with the most discriminatory power are biased towards lower difficulty items, leaving much room for improvement. Lastly, we highlight the role of popularity in evaluation by investigating how user engagement and item popularity influence recommendation difficulty.

References

[1]
Charu C Aggarwal. 2016. Evaluating recommender systems. Recommender Systems: The Textbook (2016), 225–254.
[2]
Qingyao Ai, Vahid Azizi, Xu Chen, and Yongfeng Zhang. 2018. Learning heterogeneous knowledge base embeddings for explainable recommendation. Algorithms 11, 9 (2018), 137.
[3]
Vito Walter Anelli, Alejandro Bellogín, Tommaso Di Noia, Dietmar Jannach, and Claudio Pomo. 2022. Top-n recommendation algorithms: A quest for the state-of-the-art. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. 121–131.
[4]
Ting Bai, Ji-Rong Wen, Jun Zhang, and Wayne Xin Zhao. 2017. A neural collaborative filtering model with interaction-based neighborhood. In Proceedings of the ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 1979–1982.
[5]
Alejandro Bellogín, Pablo Castells, and Iván Cantador. 2017. Statistical biases in information retrieval metrics for recommender systems. Information Retrieval Journal 20 (2017), 606–634.
[6]
Rianne van den Berg, Thomas N Kipf, and Max Welling. 2017. Graph convolutional matrix completion. arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.02263 (2017).
[7]
Allan Birnbaum. 1968. Some latent trait models and their use in inferring an examinee’s ability. Statistical Theories of Mental Test Scores (1968).
[8]
Paul-Christian Bürkner. 2021. Bayesian Item Response Modeling in R with brms and Stan. Journal of Statistical Software 100 (2021), 1–54.
[9]
Rocío Cañamares and Pablo Castells. 2020. On target item sampling in offline recommender system evaluation. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 259–268.
[10]
Yixin Cao, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Zikun Hu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2019. Unifying knowledge graph learning and recommendation: Towards a better understanding of user preferences. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 151–161.
[11]
Chong Chen, Min Zhang, Yongfeng Zhang, Yiqun Liu, and Shaoping Ma. 2020. Efficient neural matrix factorization without sampling for recommendation. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 38, 2 (2020), 1–28.
[12]
Heng-Tze Cheng, Levent Koc, Jeremiah Harmsen, Tal Shaked, Tushar Chandra, Hrishi Aradhye, Glen Anderson, Greg Corrado, Wei Chai, Mustafa Ispir, 2016. Wide & deep learning for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Deep Learning for Recommender Systems. 7–10.
[13]
Paolo Cremonesi, Yehuda Koren, and Roberto Turrin. 2010. Performance of recommender algorithms on top-n recommendation tasks. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 39–46.
[14]
Alexander Dallmann, Daniel Zoller, and Andreas Hotho. 2021. A case study on sampling strategies for evaluating neural sequential item recommendation models. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 505–514.
[15]
Mukund Deshpande and George Karypis. 2004. Item-based top-n recommendation algorithms. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 22, 1 (2004), 143–177.
[16]
Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Simone Boglio, Paolo Cremonesi, and Dietmar Jannach. 2021. A troubling analysis of reproducibility and progress in recommender systems research. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 39, 2 (2021), 1–49.
[17]
Robert D Gibbons, David J Weiss, David J Kupfer, Ellen Frank, Andrea Fagiolini, Victoria J Grochocinski, Dulal K Bhaumik, Angela Stover, R Darrell Bock, and Jason C Immekus. 2008. Using computerized adaptive testing to reduce the burden of mental health assessment. Psychiatric Services 59, 4 (2008), 361–368.
[18]
Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Yunming Ye, Zhenguo Li, and Xiuqiang He. 2017. DeepFM: a factorization-machine based neural network for CTR prediction. In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 1725–1731.
[19]
Ruining He and Julian McAuley. 2016. Ups and downs: Modeling the visual evolution of fashion trends with one-class collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on World Wide Web. 507–517.
[20]
Xiangnan He, Kuan Deng, Xiang Wang, Yan Li, Yongdong Zhang, and Meng Wang. 2020. Lightgcn: Simplifying and powering graph convolution network for recommendation. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 639–648.
[21]
Xiangnan He, Xiaoyu Du, Xiang Wang, Feng Tian, Jinhui Tang, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2018. Outer product-based neural collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 2227–2233.
[22]
Xiangnan He, Zhankui He, Jingkuan Song, Zhenguang Liu, Yu-Gang Jiang, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2018. NAIS: Neural attentive item similarity model for recommendation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 30, 12 (2018), 2354–2366.
[23]
Xiangnan He, Lizi Liao, Hanwang Zhang, Liqiang Nie, Xia Hu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2017. Neural collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. 173–182.
[24]
Jonathan L Herlocker, Joseph A Konstan, Loren G Terveen, and John T Riedl. 2004. Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 22, 1 (2004), 5–53.
[25]
Po-Sen Huang, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng, Alex Acero, and Larry Heck. 2013. Learning deep structured semantic models for web search using clickthrough data. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 2333–2338.
[26]
Kalervo Järvelin and Jaana Kekäläinen. 2002. Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 20, 4 (2002), 422–446.
[27]
Michael I Jordan, Zoubin Ghahramani, Tommi S Jaakkola, and Lawrence K Saul. 1999. An introduction to variational methods for graphical models. Machine Learning 37 (1999), 183–233.
[28]
Yuchin Juan, Yong Zhuang, Wei-Sheng Chin, and Chih-Jen Lin. 2016. Field-aware factorization machines for CTR prediction. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 43–50.
[29]
Santosh Kabbur, Xia Ning, and George Karypis. 2013. Fism: factored item similarity models for top-n recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 659–667.
[30]
Marius Kaminskas and Derek Bridge. 2016. Diversity, serendipity, novelty, and coverage: a survey and empirical analysis of beyond-accuracy objectives in recommender systems. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems 7, 1 (2016), 1–42.
[31]
Denis Kotkov, Alan Medlar, and Dorota Glowacka. 2023. Rethinking Serendipity in Recommender Systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. 383–387.
[32]
Walid Krichene and Steffen Rendle. 2020. On sampled metrics for item recommendation. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 1748–1757.
[33]
John P Lalor, Hao Wu, Tsendsuren Munkhdalai, and Hong Yu. 2018. Understanding deep learning performance through an examination of test set difficulty: A psychometric case study. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Vol. 2018. 4711.
[34]
John P Lalor, Hao Wu, and Hong Yu. 2016. Building an Evaluation Scale using Item Response Theory. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 648–657.
[35]
John P Lalor, Hao Wu, and Hong Yu. 2019. Learning Latent Parameters without Human Response Patterns: Item Response Theory with Artificial Crowds. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. 4249–4259.
[36]
John P Lalor, Hao Wu, and Hong Yu. 2019. Learning Latent Parameters without Human Response Patterns: Item Response Theory with Artificial Crowds. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. 4249–4259.
[37]
Jianxun Lian, Xiaohuan Zhou, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongxia Chen, Xing Xie, and Guangzhong Sun. 2018. xdeepfm: Combining explicit and implicit feature interactions for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 1754–1763.
[38]
Dawen Liang, Rahul G Krishnan, Matthew D Hoffman, and Tony Jebara. 2018. Variational autoencoders for collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 689–698.
[39]
Richard J Light, J Richard, Richard Light, David B Pillemer, 1984. Summing up: The science of reviewing research. Harvard University Press.
[40]
Zihan Lin, Changxin Tian, Yupeng Hou, and Wayne Xin Zhao. 2022. Improving graph collaborative filtering with neighborhood-enriched contrastive learning. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 2320–2329.
[41]
Yang Liu, Alan Medlar, and Dorota Głowacka. 2023. On the consistency, discriminative power and robustness of sampled metrics in offline top-n recommender system evaluation. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems.
[42]
Sam Lobel, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, and Lawrence Carin. 2019. Towards amortized ranking-critical training for collaborative filtering. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.04281 (2019).
[43]
Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Peng Cui, Hongxia Yang, and Wenwu Zhu. 2019. Learning disentangled representations for recommendation. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (2019).
[44]
Kelong Mao, Jieming Zhu, Jinpeng Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xi Xiao, and Xiuqiang He. 2021. SimpleX: A simple and strong baseline for collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 1243–1252.
[45]
Fernando Martínez-Plumed, Ricardo BC Prudêncio, Adolfo Martínez-Usó, and José Hernández-Orallo. 2019. Item response theory in AI: Analysing machine learning classifiers at the instance level. Artificial Intelligence 271 (2019), 18–42.
[46]
Sean M McNee, John Riedl, and Joseph A Konstan. 2006. Being accurate is not enough: how accuracy metrics have hurt recommender systems. In CHI Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1097–1101.
[47]
João VC Moraes, Jéssica TS Reinaldo, Manuel Ferreira-Junior, Telmo Silva Filho, and Ricardo BC Prudêncio. 2022. Evaluating regression algorithms at the instance level using item response theory. Knowledge-Based Systems 240 (2022), 108076.
[48]
Xia Ning and George Karypis. 2011. Slim: Sparse linear methods for top-n recommender systems. In IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining. 497–506.
[49]
Junwei Pan, Jian Xu, Alfonso Lobos Ruiz, Wenliang Zhao, Shengjun Pan, Yu Sun, and Quan Lu. 2018. Field-weighted factorization machines for click-through rate prediction in display advertising. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 1349–1357.
[50]
Yanru Qu, Han Cai, Kan Ren, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu, Ying Wen, and Jun Wang. 2016. Product-based neural networks for user response prediction. In IEEE 16th International Conference on Data Mining. 1149–1154.
[51]
Georg Rasch. 1960. Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests. Danish Institute for Educational Research.
[52]
Steffen Rendle. 2010. Factorization machines. In IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. 995–1000.
[53]
Steffen Rendle, Christoph Freudenthaler, Zeno Gantner, and Lars Schmidt-Thieme. 2009. BPR: Bayesian personalized ranking from implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 25th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. 452–461.
[54]
Matthew Richardson, Ewa Dominowska, and Robert Ragno. 2007. Predicting clicks: estimating the click-through rate for new ads. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on World Wide Web. 521–530.
[55]
Pedro Rodriguez, Joe Barrow, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, John P Lalor, Robin Jia, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. 2021. Evaluation Examples Are Not Equally Informative: How Should That Change NLP Leaderboards?. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing. 4486–4503.
[56]
John Rust and Susan Golombok. 2014. Modern psychometrics: The science of psychological assessment. Routledge.
[57]
Ilya Shenbin, Anton Alekseev, Elena Tutubalina, Valentin Malykh, and Sergey I Nikolenko. 2020. Recvae: A new variational autoencoder for top-n recommendations with implicit feedback. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 528–536.
[58]
Thiago Silveira, Min Zhang, Xiao Lin, Yiqun Liu, and Shaoping Ma. 2019. How good your recommender system is? A survey on evaluations in recommendation. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics 10 (2019), 813–831.
[59]
Weiping Song, Chence Shi, Zhiping Xiao, Zhijian Duan, Yewen Xu, Ming Zhang, and Jian Tang. 2019. Autoint: Automatic feature interaction learning via self-attentive neural networks. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 1161–1170.
[60]
Harald Steck. 2019. Embarrassingly shallow autoencoders for sparse data. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 3251–3257.
[61]
Harald Steck, Maria Dimakopoulou, Nickolai Riabov, and Tony Jebara. 2020. Admm slim: Sparse recommendations for many users. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 555–563.
[62]
Zhu Sun, Di Yu, Hui Fang, Jie Yang, Xinghua Qu, Jie Zhang, and Cong Geng. 2020. Are we evaluating rigorously? Benchmarking recommendation for reproducible evaluation and fair comparison. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 23–32.
[63]
Jian Tang, Meng Qu, Mingzhe Wang, Ming Zhang, Jun Yan, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2015. Line: Large-scale information network embedding. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. 1067–1077.
[64]
Daniel Valcarce, Alejandro Bellogín, Javier Parapar, and Pablo Castells. 2018. On the robustness and discriminative power of information retrieval metrics for top-N recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 260–268.
[65]
Hongwei Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Mengdi Zhang, Jure Leskovec, Miao Zhao, Wenjie Li, and Zhongyuan Wang. 2019. Knowledge-aware graph neural networks with label smoothness regularization for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 968–977.
[66]
Hongwei Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Miao Zhao, Wenjie Li, Xing Xie, and Minyi Guo. 2019. Multi-task feature learning for knowledge graph enhanced recommendation. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 2000–2010.
[67]
Hongwei Wang, Miao Zhao, Xing Xie, Wenjie Li, and Minyi Guo. 2019. Knowledge graph convolutional networks for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 3307–3313.
[68]
Ruoxi Wang, Bin Fu, Gang Fu, and Mingliang Wang. 2017. Deep & cross network for ad click predictions. In Proceedings of the ADKDD’17. 1–7.
[69]
Ruoxi Wang, Rakesh Shivanna, Derek Cheng, Sagar Jain, Dong Lin, Lichan Hong, and Ed Chi. 2021. Dcn v2: Improved deep & cross network and practical lessons for web-scale learning to rank systems. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 1785–1797.
[70]
Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Yixin Cao, Meng Liu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2019. Kgat: Knowledge graph attention network for recommendation. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 950–958.
[71]
Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Meng Wang, Fuli Feng, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2019. Neural graph collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 165–174.
[72]
Xiang Wang, Tinglin Huang, Dingxian Wang, Yancheng Yuan, Zhenguang Liu, Xiangnan He, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2021. Learning intents behind interactions with knowledge graph for recommendation. In Proceedings of the Web Conference. 878–887.
[73]
Xiang Wang, Hongye Jin, An Zhang, Xiangnan He, Tong Xu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2020. Disentangled graph collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 1001–1010.
[74]
David J Weiss. 1982. Improving measurement quality and efficiency with adaptive testing. Applied Psychological Measurement 6, 4 (1982), 473–492.
[75]
David J Weiss. 2004. Computerized adaptive testing for effective and efficient measurement in counseling and education. Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development 37, 2 (2004), 70–84.
[76]
Ga Wu, Maksims Volkovs, Chee Loong Soon, Scott Sanner, and Himanshu Rai. 2019. Noise contrastive estimation for one-class collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 135–144.
[77]
Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He, Liang Chen, Jianxun Lian, and Xing Xie. 2021. Self-supervised graph learning for recommendation. In Proceedings of the 44th international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. 726–735.
[78]
Mike Wu, Richard L Davis, Benjamin W Domingue, Chris Piech, and Noah Goodman. 2020. Variational item response theory: Fast, accurate, and expressive. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.00276 (2020).
[79]
Yao Wu, Christopher DuBois, Alice X Zheng, and Martin Ester. 2016. Collaborative denoising auto-encoders for top-n recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. 153–162.
[80]
Jun Xiao, Hao Ye, Xiangnan He, Hanwang Zhang, Fei Wu, and Tat-Seng Chua. 2017. Attentional factorization machines: learning the weight of feature interactions via attention networks. In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 3119–3125.
[81]
Hong-Jian Xue, Xin-Yu Dai, Jianbing Zhang, Shujian Huang, and Jiajun Chen. 2017. Deep matrix factorization models for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 3203–3209.
[82]
Fuzheng Zhang, Nicholas Jing Yuan, Defu Lian, Xing Xie, and Wei-Ying Ma. 2016. Collaborative knowledge base embedding for recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 353–362.
[83]
Weinan Zhang, Tianming Du, and Jun Wang. 2016. Deep Learning over Multi-field Categorical Data: –A Case Study on User Response Prediction. In Proceedings of the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research. 45–57.
[84]
Wayne Xin Zhao, Zihan Lin, Zhichao Feng, Pengfei Wang, and Ji-Rong Wen. 2022. A revisiting study of appropriate offline evaluation for top-N recommendation algorithms. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 41, 2 (2022), 1–41.
[85]
Wayne Xin Zhao, Shanlei Mu, Yupeng Hou, Zihan Lin, Yushuo Chen, Xingyu Pan, Kaiyuan Li, Yujie Lu, Hui Wang, Changxin Tian, 2021. Recbole: Towards a unified, comprehensive and efficient framework for recommendation algorithms. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. 4653–4664.
[86]
Lei Zheng, Chun-Ta Lu, Fei Jiang, Jiawei Zhang, and Philip S Yu. 2018. Spectral collaborative filtering. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. 311–319.
[87]
Stelios Zygouris and Magda Tsolaki. 2015. Computerized cognitive testing for older adults: a review. American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias 30, 1 (2015), 13–28.

Index Terms

  1. What We Evaluate When We Evaluate Recommender Systems: Understanding Recommender Systems’ Performance using Item Response Theory

      Recommendations

      Comments

      Information & Contributors

      Information

      Published In

      cover image ACM Conferences
      RecSys '23: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
      September 2023
      1406 pages
      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

      Sponsors

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 14 September 2023

      Check for updates

      Author Tags

      1. item response theory
      2. offline evaluation
      3. recommender systems
      4. user preferences

      Qualifiers

      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Conference

      RecSys '23: Seventeenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
      September 18 - 22, 2023
      Singapore, Singapore

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate 254 of 1,295 submissions, 20%

      Contributors

      Other Metrics

      Bibliometrics & Citations

      Bibliometrics

      Article Metrics

      • 0
        Total Citations
      • 1,537
        Total Downloads
      • Downloads (Last 12 months)1,157
      • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)107
      Reflects downloads up to 09 Nov 2024

      Other Metrics

      Citations

      View Options

      View options

      PDF

      View or Download as a PDF file.

      PDF

      eReader

      View online with eReader.

      eReader

      HTML Format

      View this article in HTML Format.

      HTML Format

      Get Access

      Login options

      Media

      Figures

      Other

      Tables

      Share

      Share

      Share this Publication link

      Share on social media