# The Unfairness of Active Users and Popularity Bias in Point-of-Interest Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.13307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Feb 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Survey on Bias and Fairness in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09635/) (2019)
- [Neural Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05031/) (2017)
- [Variational Autoencoders for Collaborative Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05814/) (2018)
- [Bias and Debias in Recommender System: A Survey and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03240/) (2020)
- [Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.06902/) (2019)
- [Causal Intervention for Leveraging Popularity Bias in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06067/) (2021)
- [Personalizing Session-based Recommendations with Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04148/) (2017)
- [Managing Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems with Personalized Re-ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07555/) (2019)
- [User-oriented Fairness in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10671/) (2021)
- [Multisided Fairness for Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00093/) (2017)
- [The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.13286/) (2019)
- [User-centered Evaluation of Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06364/) (2021)
- [A Review of Modern Fashion Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02757/) (2022)
- [The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Music Recommendation: A Reproducibility Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04696/) (2019)
- [Addressing Marketing Bias in Product Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01799/) (2019)
- [Joint Geographical and Temporal Modeling based on Matrix Factorization for Point-of-Interest Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08961/) (2020)
- [Analyzing Item Popularity Bias of Music Recommender Systems: Are Different Genders Equally Affected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06973/) (2021)
- [On Sampling Collaborative Filtering Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.04768/) (2022)
- [Consumer Fairness in Recommender Systems: Contextualizing Definitions and Mitigations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08614/) (2022)
- [LGLMF: Local Geographical based Logistic Matrix Factorization Model for POI Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06667/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [A Survey on Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01118/) (2023)
- [Fairness in Recommender Systems: Research Landscape and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11127/) (2022)
- [CPFair: Personalized Consumer and Producer Fairness Re-ranking for Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08085/) (2022)
- [Understanding Biases in ChatGPT-based Recommender Systems: Provider Fairness, Temporal Stability, and Recency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10545/) (2024)
- [Trustworthy Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06265/) (2022)
- [Experiments on Generalizability of User-Oriented Fairness in Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08289/) (2022)
- [Heterophily-Aware Fair Recommendation using Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03365/) (2024)
- [When Newer is Not Better: Does Deep Learning Really Benefit Recommendation From Implicit Feedback?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01801/) (2023)
- [Fair Agents: Balancing Multistakeholder Alignment in Multi-Agent Personalization Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02379/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommender systems provide personalized recommendations to users and help businesses attract potential customers. Despite their success, recent studies suggest that highly data-driven recommendations could be impacted by data biases, resulting in unfair outcomes for different stakeholders, mainly consumers (users) and providers (items). Most existing fairness-related research works in recommender systems treat user fairness and item fairness issues individually, disregarding that RS work in a two-sided marketplace. This paper studies the interplay between (i) the unfairness of active users, (ii) the unfairness of popular items, and (iii) the accuracy (personalization) of recommendation as three angles of our study triangle. We group users into advantaged and disadvantaged levels to measure user fairness based on their activity level. For item fairness, we divide items into short-head, mid-tail, and long-tail groups and study the exposure of these item groups into the top-k recommendation list of users. Experimental validation of eight different recommendation models commonly used for POI recommendation (e.g., contextual, CF) on two publicly available POI recommendation datasets, Gowalla and Yelp, indicate that most well-performing models suffer seriously from the unfairness of popularity bias (provider unfairness). Furthermore, our study shows that most recommendation models cannot satisfy both consumer and producer fairness, indicating a trade-off between these variables possibly due to natural biases in data. We choose the POI recommendation as our test scenario; however, the insights should be trivially extendable on other domains.