Giacomo Medda, Francesco Fabbri, Mirko Marras, Ludovico Boratto, Gianni Fenu
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GNNUERS: Fairness Explanation in GNNs for Recommendation via Counterfactual Reasoning
Nowadays, research into personalization has been focusing on explainability and fairness. Several approaches proposed in recent works are able to explain individual recommendations in a post-hoc manner or by explanation paths. However, explainability techniques applied to unfairness in recommendation have been limited to finding user/item features mostly related to biased recommendations. In this paper, we devised a novel algorithm that leverages counterfactuality methods to discover user unfairness explanations in the form of user-item interactions. In our counterfactual framework, interactions are represented as edges in a bipartite graph, with users and items as nodes. Our bipartite graph explainer perturbs the topological structure to find an altered version that minimizes the disparity in utility between the protected and unprotected demographic groups. Experiments on four real-world graphs coming from various domains showed that our method can systematically explain user unfairness on three state-of-the-art GNN-based recommendation models. Moreover, an empirical evaluation of the perturbed network uncovered relevant patterns that justify the nature of the unfairness discovered by the generated explanations. The source code and the preprocessed data sets are available at https://github.com/jackmedda/RS-BGExplainer.
期刊介绍:
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology is a scholarly journal that publishes the highest quality papers on intelligent systems, applicable algorithms and technology with a multi-disciplinary perspective. An intelligent system is one that uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to offer important services (e.g., as a component of a larger system) to allow integrated systems to perceive, reason, learn, and act intelligently in the real world.
ACM TIST is published quarterly (six issues a year). Each issue has 8-11 regular papers, with around 20 published journal pages or 10,000 words per paper. Additional references, proofs, graphs or detailed experiment results can be submitted as a separate appendix, while excessively lengthy papers will be rejected automatically. Authors can include online-only appendices for additional content of their published papers and are encouraged to share their code and/or data with other readers.