Diversity in Network-Friendly Recommendations

TL;DR

This paper addresses the reduction in content diversity caused by network-friendly recommendation algorithms and proposes an optimization approach to balance network efficiency with content diversity.

Contribution

It introduces the first formulation of diversity-aware network-friendly recommendation algorithms and provides an efficient linear programming solution.

Findings

Diverse-NFR achieves high network gains similar to traditional NFR.

The proposed method maintains content diversity effectively.

Optimization can be performed efficiently with linear programming.

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet has been dominated by content-rich platforms, employing recommendation systems to provide users with more appealing content (e.g., videos in YouTube, movies in Netflix). While traditional content recommendations are oblivious to network conditions, the paradigm of Network-Friendly Recommendations (NFR) has recently emerged, favoring content that improves network performance (e.g. cached near the user), while still being appealing to the user. However, NFR algorithms sometimes achieve their goal by shrinking the pool of content recommended to users. The undesirable side-effect is reduced content diversity, a phenomenon known as ``content/filter bubble''. This reduced diversity is problematic for both users, who are prevented from exploring a broader range of content, and content creators (e.g. YouTubers) whose content may be recommended less frequently, leading to perceived unfairness. In this paper, we first investigate - using real data and state-of-the-art NFR schemes - the extent of this phenomenon. We then formulate a ``Diverse-NFR'' optimization problem (i.e., network-friendly recommendations with - sufficient - content diversity), and through a series of transformation steps, we manage to reduce it to a linear program that can be solved fast and optimally. Our findings show that Diverse-NFR can achieve high network gains (comparable to non-diverse NFR) while maintaining diversity constraints. To our best knowledge, this is the first work that incorporates diversity issues into network-friendly recommendation algorithms.