Towards Reliable Item Sampling for Recommendation Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper introduces new sampling estimators and adaptive methods to improve the accuracy and reliability of recommendation evaluation metrics, addressing theoretical gaps and the 'blind spot' issue in item sampling.

Contribution

It proposes a novel item-sampling estimator with theoretical error optimization and an adaptive sampling approach to mitigate the 'blind spot' problem, enhancing evaluation reliability.

Findings

The new estimator outperforms previous methods in accuracy.

The adaptive sampling method effectively addresses the 'blind spot' issue.

Experimental results validate the theoretical analysis and improvements.

Abstract

Since Rendle and Krichene argued that commonly used sampling-based evaluation metrics are "inconsistent" with respect to the global metrics (even in expectation), there have been a few studies on the sampling-based recommender system evaluation. Existing methods try either mapping the sampling-based metrics to their global counterparts or more generally, learning the empirical rank distribution to estimate the top-$K$ metrics. However, despite existing efforts, there is still a lack of rigorous theoretical understanding of the proposed metric estimators, and the basic item sampling also suffers from the "blind spot" issue, i.e., estimation accuracy to recover the top-$K$ metrics when $K$ is small can still be rather substantial. In this paper, we provide an in-depth investigation into these problems and make two innovative contributions. First, we propose a new item-sampling estimator that explicitly optimizes the error with respect to the ground truth, and theoretically highlight its subtle difference against prior work. Second, we propose a new adaptive sampling method which aims to deal with the "blind spot" problem and also demonstrate the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm can be generalized for such a setting. Our experimental results confirm our statistical analysis and the superiority of the proposed works. This study helps lay the theoretical foundation for adopting item sampling metrics for recommendation evaluation, and provides strong evidence towards making item sampling a powerful and reliable tool for recommendation evaluation.