Popularity Bias is not Always Evil: Disentangling Benign and Harmful Bias for Recommendation

Recommender system usually suffers from severe
popularity bias
— the collected interaction data usually exhibits quite imbalanced or even long-tailed distribution over items. Such skewed distribution may result from the users’
conformity
to the group, which deviates from reflecting users’ true preference. Existing efforts for tackling this issue mainly focus on completely eliminating popularity bias. However, we argue that not all popularity bias is evil. Popularity bias not only results from conformity but also
item quality
, which is usually ignored by existing methods. Some items exhibit higher popularity as they have intrinsic better property. Blindly removing the popularity bias would lose such important signal, and further deteriorate model performance. To sufficiently exploit such important information for recommendation, it is essential to disentangle the benign popularity bias caused by item quality from the harmful popularity bias caused by conformity. Although important, it is quite challenging as we lack an explicit signal to differentiate the two factors of popularity bias. In this paper, we propose to leverage temporal information as the two factors exhibit quite different patterns along the time: item quality revealing item inherent property is stable and static while conformity that depends on items’ recent clicks is highly time-sensitive. Correspondingly, we further propose a novel
Ti
me-aware
D
is
E
ntangled framework (
TIDE
), where a click is generated from three components namely the static item quality, the dynamic conformity effect, as well as the user-item matching score returned by any recommendation model. Lastly, we conduct interventional inference so that the recommendation can benefit from the benign popularity bias while circumvent the harmful one. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of TIDE.