Personality Bias of Music Recommendation Algorithms

PersonalityBias Teaser

Abstract

Recommender systems, like other tools that make use of machine learning, are known to create or increase certain biases. Earlier work has already unveiled different performance of recommender systems for different user groups, depending on gender, age, country, and consumption behavior. In this work, we study user bias in terms of another aspect, i.e., users’ personality. We investigate to which extent state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms yield different accuracy scores depending on the users’ personality traits. We focus on the music domain and create a dataset of Twitter users’ music consumption behavior and personality traits, measuring the latter in terms of the OCEAN model. Investigating recall@K and NDCG@K of the recommendation algorithms SLIM, embarrassingly shallow autoencoders for sparse data (EASE), and variational autoencoders for collaborative filtering (Mult-VAE) on this dataset, we find several significant differences in performance between user groups scoring high vs. groups scoring low on several personality traits.


Citation

Alessandro B. Melchiorre, Eva Zangerle, Markus Schedl
Personality Bias of Music Recommendation Algorithms
Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), 533–538, doi:10.1145/3383313.3412223, 2020.

BibTeX

@article{Melchiorre2020PersonalityBias,
    title = {Personality Bias of Music Recommendation Algorithms},
    author = {Melchiorre, Alessandro B. and Zangerle, Eva and Schedl, Markus},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    doi = {10.1145/3383313.3412223},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3383313.3412223},
    pages = {533–538},
    location = {Virtual Event, Brazil},
    year = {2020}
}