Detecting Sponsored Recommendations

Abstract

Personalized recommender systems provide great opportunities for targeted advertisements, by displaying ads alongside genuine recommendations. We consider a biased recommendation system where such ads are displayed without any tags (disguised as genuine recommendations), rendering them indistinguishable to users. We consider the problem of detecting such a bias and propose an algorithm that uses statistical analysis based on binary feedback data from a subset of users. We prove that the proposed algorithm detects bias with high probability for a broad class of recommendation systems with sufficient number of feedback samples.

Publication
ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems (TOMPECS) 2.1 (2016): 6.
Date
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