Reproducing "Online certification of preference-based fairness for personalized recommender systems"

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Installation

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It is suggested to use a virtual environment to run this project, such as Miniconda or Micromamba. The following commands work with (Mini)Conda.

Assuming you are in the root directory of the git project, to install the MLRC_OCEF environment run:

conda env create -f env.yml

(Optional) Install development dependencies, such as Jupyter Notebook/Lab:

conda env update -f env.dev.yml

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Running the results notebook

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Follow these steps to run a Jupyter notebook presenting the results reproduced from the original paper. These command work on Linux; follow a similar process on Windows or macOS.

1. Unzip the pretrained models for experiment 5.1 "Sources of envy from model misspecification" in the root directory of the git project.

   unzip models_and_hyperparams.zip
   

   Make sure to place the contents of the archive - movielens-1m and lastfm - at the root of the git project.
2. Activate the MLRC_OCEF environment (e.g. with Conda):

   conda activate MLRC_OCEF
   

3. Start a notebook from inside the MLRC_OCEF Python package, and evaluate all the cells:

   cd MLRC_OCEF
   jupyter lab
   

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Running the project

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The main entry point for our reproduction study is MLRC_OCEF/main.py. To see the different options accepted by the program, assuming you are at the root of the git project, run:

python MLRC_OCEF/main.py -h

Our reproduction study is configurable, and the above command will present all the various running options.

Bandit experiment

To reproduce the synthetic bandit experiment from the original paper, run:

python MLRC_OCEF/main.py --experiment bandit-synthetic

If the project's root contains the folder results_ocef, precomputed cost and duration files will be loaded from there, and will produce a graph in results_ocef/ocef.png. To run the bandit experiment from scratch, rename or delete the results_ocef folder and run the above command.

Envy from model misspecification

To fully reproduce the experiments concerning envy from model misspecification, make sure there are no folders movielens-1m and lastfm at the root of the git project. Then, run:

python MLRC_OCEF/main.py --experiment envy-misspecification

To reproduce all the additional plots in results_envy, run the MLRC_OCEF/envy_experiments.py script; new plots will be saved to results_envy. Then, you can use the configurations described in that script from inside MLRC_OCEF/results_notebook.ipynb to visualize the plots interactively.

Alternatively, you can copy any of those configurations in MLRC_OCEF/results_notebook.ipynb and evaluate the notebook to produce the corresponding plot.

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References

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To refer to the original paper, please cite:

@article{online_cert,
  author    = {Virginie Do and
	       Sam Corbett{-}Davies and
	       Jamal Atif and
	       Nicolas Usunier},
  title     = {Online certification of preference-based fairness for personalized
	       recommender systems},
  journal   = {CoRR},
  volume    = {abs/2104.14527},
  year      = {2021},
  url       = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.14527},
  eprinttype = {arXiv},
  eprint    = {2104.14527},
  timestamp = {Tue, 04 May 2021 15:12:43 +0200},
  biburl    = {https://dblp.org/rec/journals/corr/abs-2104-14527.bib},
  bibsource = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}