The Influence of Herd Mentality on Rating Bias and Popularity Bias: A Bi-Process Debiasing Recommendation Model Based on Matrix Factorization

Abstract

To reduce the impact of rating bias and popularity bias in recommender system, and make the recommender system reach a balance between recommendation utility and debias effect at the same time, we propose a bi-process debiasing recommendation model based on matrix factorization. Firstly, considering the problem that the user’s ratings are affected by the herd mentality, which leads to a consistency between the rating and the selection of rating items, resulting in the power-law distribution, the k-times parabolic fuzzy distribution was used to fuse the user’s age to redistribute the ratings. Secondly, the loss function is optimized by the continuously increasing flow and popularity of items. Finally, user emotion and item popularity are combined to construct user psychological tendency, which is divided into three levels: strong, medium and weak, and different levels are given different weights. To verify the performance of the model, the experimental results on real datasets show that the model proposed in this paper not only effectively reduces the recommendation bias but also ensures the recommendation utility.

Keywords

• power-law distribution
• herd mentality
• rating bias
• popularity bias
• recommender system