Opportunistic Multi-aspect Fairness through Personalized Re-ranking

TL;DR

This paper introduces a personalized re-ranking method that considers multiple fairness aspects and individual preferences to improve fairness in recommendations without sacrificing accuracy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel opportunistic, metric-agnostic re-ranking approach that incorporates multiple fairness dimensions and personal preferences, enhancing fairness in recommender systems.

Findings

Better trade-off between accuracy and fairness compared to prior methods.

Effective across multiple fairness dimensions.

Learns individual preferences to improve provider fairness.

Abstract

As recommender systems have become more widespread and moved into areas with greater social impact, such as employment and housing, researchers have begun to seek ways to ensure fairness in the results that such systems produce. This work has primarily focused on developing recommendation approaches in which fairness metrics are jointly optimized along with recommendation accuracy. However, the previous work had largely ignored how individual preferences may limit the ability of an algorithm to produce fair recommendations. Furthermore, with few exceptions, researchers have only considered scenarios in which fairness is measured relative to a single sensitive feature or attribute (such as race or gender). In this paper, we present a re-ranking approach to fairness-aware recommendation that learns individual preferences across multiple fairness dimensions and uses them to enhance provider fairness in recommendation results. Specifically, we show that our opportunistic and metric-agnostic approach achieves a better trade-off between accuracy and fairness than prior re-ranking approaches and does so across multiple fairness dimensions.