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Addressing the Target Customer Distortion Problem in Recommender Systems

Predicting the potential target customers for a product is essential. However, traditional recommender systems typically aim to optimize an engagement metric without considering the overall distribution of target customers, thereby leading to serious distortion problems. In this paper, we conduct a data-driven study to reveal several distortions that arise from conventional recommenders. Toward overcoming these issues, we propose a target customer re-ranking algorithm to adjust the population distribution and composition in the Top-k target customers of an item while maintaining recommendation quality. By applying this proposed algorithm onto a real-world dataset, we find the proposed method can effectively make the class distribution of items’ target customers close to the desired distribution, thereby mitigating distortion.