Provider Fairness for Diversity and Coverage in Multi-Stakeholder Recommender Systems

Nowadays, recommender systems (RS) are no longer evaluated only for the accuracy of their recommendations. Instead, there is a requirement for other metrics (e.g., coverage, diversity, serendipity) to be taken into account as well. In this context, the multi-stakeholder RS paradigm (MSRS) has gained significant popularity, as it takes into consideration all beneficiaries involved, from item providers to simple users. In this paper, the goal is to provide fair recommendations across item providers in terms of diversity and coverage for users to whom each provider’s items are recommended. This is achieved by following the methodology provided by the literature for solving the recommendation problem as an optimization problem under constraints for coverage and diversity. As the constraints for diversity are quadratic and cannot be solved in sufficient time (NP-Hard problem), we propose a heuristic approach that provides solutions very close to the optimal one, as the proposed approach in the literature for solving diversity constraints was too generic. As a next step, we evaluate the results and identify several weaknesses in the problem formulation as provided in the literature. To this end, we introduce new formulations for diversity and provide a new heuristic approach for the solution of the new optimization problem.