People click on top items in search and recommendations more often because they are on top, not because of their relevancy. How can this problem be s

Dealing with Position Bias in Recommendations and Search

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2023-03-14 18:30:10

People click on top items in search and recommendations more often because they are on top, not because of their relevancy. How can this problem be solved?

People click on top items in search and recommendations more often because they are on top, not because of their relevancy. If you order your search results with an ML model, they may eventually degrade in quality because of such a positive self-reinforcing feedback loop. How can this problem be solved?

Every time you present a list of things, such as search results or recommendations, to a human being, rarely can we fairly evaluate all the items in the list.

A cascade click model assumes that people evaluate all the items in the list sequentially before they find the relevant one. But then it means that things on the bottom have a smaller chance to be evaluated at all, hence will organically have fewer clicks:

Top items receive more clicks only because of their position?—?this behavior is called position bias. However, the position bias is not the only bias in item lists, there are plenty of other dangerous things to watch out for:

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