Study of a bias in the offline evaluation of a recommendation algorithm

Abstract

Recommendation systems have been integrated into the majority of large online systems to filter and rank information according to user profiles. It thus influences the way users interact with the system and, as a consequence, bias the evaluation of the performance of a recommendation algorithm computed using historical data (via offline evaluation). This paper describes this bias and discuss the relevance of a weighted offline evaluation to reduce this bias for different classes of recommendation algorithms.