Counterfactual Music Recommendation for Mitigating Popularity Bias

Music recommendation systems aim to suggest tracks that users may enjoy. However, the accuracy of recommendation results is affected by popularity bias. Previous studies have focused on mitigating the direct effect of single-item popularity in video, news, or e-commerce recommendations, but have overlooked the multisource popularity biases in music recommendations. This article proposes a causal inference-based method to reduce the influence of both track and artist popularity. First, we construct a causal graph that encompasses users, tracks, and artists within the context of music recommendations. Next, we employ matrix factorization in conjunction with counterfactual inference theory to mitigate the popularity effects of artists and tracks, taking into account both the natural direct and indirect effects of these entities on music recommendations. Experimental results evaluated on four music recommendation datasets indicate that our method outperforms other baselines and effectively alleviates the popularity bias of both tracks and artists.