An approach towards debiasing user ratings

TL;DR

This paper presents an algorithm to identify and mitigate user rating biases in e-commerce platforms, improving the accuracy of product ratings and recommendations.

Contribution

The authors propose a novel method to detect user biases and adjust ratings accordingly, enhancing the reliability of rating-based systems.

Findings

Efficiently captures user bias in rating data.

Improves accuracy of true product ratings.

Effective in real-world e-commerce datasets.

Abstract

With increasing importance of e-commerce, many websites have emerged where users can express their opinions about products, such as movies, books, songs, etc. Such interactions can be modeled as bipartite graphs where the weight of the directed edge from a user to a product denotes a rating that the user imparts to the product. These graphs are used for recommendation systems and discovering most reliable (trusted) products. For these applications, it is important to capture the bias of a user when she is rating a product. Users have inherent bias---many users always impart high ratings while many others always rate poorly. It is necessary to know the bias of a reviewer while reading the review of a product. It is equally important to compensate for this bias while assigning a ranking for an object. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to capture the bias of a user and then subdue it to compute the true rating a product deserves. Experiments show the efficiency and effectiveness of our system in capturing the bias of users and then computing the true ratings of a product.