Considerations on Recommendation Independence for a Find-Good-Items Task

This paper examines the notion of recommendation independence, which is a constraint that a recommendation result is independent from specific information. This constraint is useful in ensuring adherence to laws and regulations, fair treatment of content providers, and exclusion of unwanted information. For example, to make a job-matching recommendation socially fair, the matching should be independent of socially sensitive information, such as gender or race. We previously developed several recommenders satisfying recommendation independence, but these were all designed for a predicting-ratings task, whose goal is to predict a score that a user would rate. We here focus on another find-good-items task, which aims to find some items that a user would prefer. In this task, scores representing the degree of preference to items are first predicted, and some items having the largest scores are displayed in the form of a ranked list. We developed a preliminary algorithm for this task through a naive approach, enhancing independence between a preference score and sensitive information. We empirically show that although this algorithm can enhance independence of a preference score, it is not fit for the purpose of enhancing independence in terms of a ranked list. This result indicates the need for inventing a notion of independence that is suitable for use with a ranked list and that is applicable for completing a find-good-items task.