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arXiv · 2502.11921

Joint Evaluation of Fairness and Relevance in Recommender Systems with Pareto Frontier

Theresia Veronika Rampisela·Tuukka Ruotsalo·Maria Maistro·Christina Lioma
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Abstract

Fairness and relevance are two important aspects of recommender systems (RSs). Typically, they are evaluated either (i) separately by individual measures of fairness and relevance, or (ii) jointly using a single measure that accounts for fairness with respect to relevance. However, approach (i) often does not provide a reliable joint estimate of the goodness of the models, as it has two different best models: one for fairness and another for relevance. Approach (ii) is also problematic because these measures tend to be ad-hoc and do not relate well to traditional relevance measures, like NDCG. Motivated by this, we present a new approach for jointly evaluating fairness and relevance in RSs: Distance to Pareto Frontier (DPFR). Given some user-item interaction data, we compute their Pareto frontier for a pair of existing relevance and fairness measures, and then use the distance from the frontier as a measure of the jointly achievable fairness and relevance. Our approach is modular and intuitive as it can be computed with existing measures. Experiments with 4 RS models, 3 re-ranking strategies, and 6 datasets show that existing metrics have inconsistent associations with our Pareto-optimal solution, making DPFR a more robust and theoretically well-founded joint measure for assessing fairness and relevance. Our code: https://github.com/theresiavr/DPFR-recsys-evaluation

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Theresia Veronika Rampisela, Tuukka Ruotsalo, Maria Maistro, Christina Lioma. 2025-02-17. Joint Evaluation of Fairness and Relevance in Recommender Systems with Pareto Frontier. https://doi.org/10.1145/3696410.3714589

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