Case Study: Specific User Spamming Hunch Primary Feed
Problem Statement
We are facing an issue where a particular user’s polls (i.e. BihariBabu) are dominating the Hunch Primary Feed of many users. Click the below link to see an illustration:
(BihariBabu) who has created 40 of the active polls. Thus,
Likelihood of a poll being part of top-K recommendation feed is 40 / 444 = 0.090090
Further, below is the the statistics of active polls based on hunches > 200 and their creators:
CREATED_BY NUM_POLLS LIKELIHOOD
amanalok88@gmail.com 12 0.117647
vipin.bitspilani2020@gmail.com 9 0.088235
drshreya1609@gmail.com 7 0.068627
syedumar21142019@gmail.com 7 0.068627
ananyasinghtomar52@gmail.com 6 0.058824
priya99.d53@gmail.com 6 0.058824
As we can observe, the likelihood for polls having hunches greater than 200 increases for the user BihariBabu.
Our AWS Personalize Feed gets recommendations from 3 different models:
User-Personalization Model
This model recipe has been tuned in a manner to recommend more hunched polls from the active polls at the top.
Trending-Now Model
The Trending-Now model recipe generates recommendations for polls that are rapidly becoming more popular with our users.
Popularity-Count Model
Popularity-Count recommends the most popular polls (more hunched polls) based on our user interactions data.
Given that of the 3 model recipes, 2 of them are biased to show more hunched polls at the top of the Personalised User Feed, “BihariBabu” dominates the feed as he has the most number of polls amongst active polls and they also come within the most hunched polls.
Since more than 95% of this user’s polls are of 30 days duration, these polls have accrued enough hunches to come in the most hunched polls while also being active.
The only model recipe which is not affected in bias towards the user “BihariBabu” is the Trending Now Model Recipe.
Prospective Solution (To be discussed)
We would need to do the following:
Re-train the User-Personalization Model Recipe to have less bias towards “most hunched polls”.
Re-think the strategy of how to mix recommended polls from the 3 recipes as one of them (Popularity-Count) will always bias towards most hunched polls amongst active polls.
Right now following is the strategy to mix the recommended polls to create the User Feed: