Modeling Attrition in Recommender Systems with Departing Bandits

Omer Ben-Porat, Lee Cohen, Liu Leqi, Zachary C. Lipton, Yishay Mansour

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Traditionally, when recommender systems are formalized as multi-armed bandits, the policy of the recommender system influences the rewards accrued, but not the length of interaction. However, in real-world systems, dissatisfied users may depart (and never come back). In this work, we propose a novel multi-armed bandit setup that captures such policy-dependent horizons. Our setup consists of a finite set of user types, and multiple arms with Bernoulli payoffs. Each (user type, arm) tuple corresponds to an (unknown) reward probability. Each user’s type is initially unknown and can only be inferred through their response to recommendations. Moreover, if a user is dissatisfied with their recommendation, they might depart the system. We first address the case where all users share the same type, demonstrating that a recent UCB-based algorithm is optimal. We then move forward to the more challenging case, where users are divided among two types. While naive approaches cannot handle this setting, we provide an efficient learning algorithm that achieves Õ(T) regret, where T is the number of users.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAAAI-22 Technical Tracks 6
PublisherAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Pages6072-6079
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)1577358767, 9781577358763
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 Jun 2022
Event36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022 - Virtual, Online
Duration: 22 Feb 20221 Mar 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022
Volume36

Conference

Conference36th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2022
CityVirtual, Online
Period22/02/221/03/22

Funding

FundersFunder number
Amazon AI
Ariane de Rothschild Women Doctoral Program
Block Center for Technology and Society
Yandex Initiative for Machine Learning
National Science FoundationIIS2040929
National Science Foundation
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme882396
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme
European Research Council
Israel Science Foundation993/17
Israel Science Foundation
Tel Aviv University

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