Improving Stability of Recommender Systems: A Meta-Algorithmic Approach

This paper focuses on the measure of recommendation stability, which reflects the consistency of recommender system predictions. Stability is a desired property of recommendation algorithms and has important implications on users' trust and acceptance of recommendations. Prior research has reported that some popular recommendation algorithms can suffer from a high degree of instability. In this study, we explore two scalable, general-purpose meta-algorithmic approaches-based on bagging and iterative smoothing-that can be used in conjunction with different traditional recommendation algorithms to improve their stability. Our experimental results on real-world rating data demonstrate that both approaches can achieve substantially higher stability as compared to the original recommendation algorithms. Furthermore, perhaps as importantly, the proposed approaches not only do not sacrifice the predictive accuracy in order to improve recommendation stability, but are actually able to provide additional accuracy improvements.