Quantifying Aspect Bias in Ordinal Ratings using a Bayesian Approach

Quantifying Aspect Bias in Ordinal Ratings using a Bayesian Approach

Lahari Poddar, Wynne Hsu, Mong Li Lee

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3791-3797. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/530

User opinions expressed in the form of ratings can influence an individual's view of an item. However, the true quality of an item is often obfuscated by user biases, and it is not obvious from the observed ratings the importance different users place on different aspects of an item. We propose a probabilistic modeling of the observed aspect ratings to infer (i) each user's aspect bias and (ii) latent intrinsic quality of an item. We model multi-aspect ratings as ordered discrete data and encode the dependency between different aspects by using a latent Gaussian structure. We handle the Gaussian-Categorical non-conjugacy using a stick-breaking formulation coupled with P\'{o}lya-Gamma auxiliary variable augmentation for a simple, fully Bayesian inference. On two real world datasets, we demonstrate the predictive ability of our model and its effectiveness in learning explainable user biases to provide insights towards a more reliable product quality estimation.
Keywords:
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Personalization and User Modeling
Uncertainty in AI: Bayesian Networks
Uncertainty in AI: Graphical Models
Machine Learning: Learning Graphical Models