Modeling Churn in Recommender Systems with Aggregated Preferences

Gur Keinan, Omer Ben-Porat

Abstract: While recommender systems (RSs) traditionally rely on extensive individual user data, regulatory and technological shifts necessitate reliance on aggregated user information. This shift significantly impacts the recommendation process, requiring RSs to engage in intensive exploration to identify user preferences. However, this approach risks user churn due to potentially unsatisfactory recommendations. In this paper, we propose a model that addresses the dual challenges of leveraging aggregated user information and mitigating churn risk. Our model assumes that the RS operates with a probabilistic prior over user types and aggregated satisfaction levels for various content types. We demonstrate that optimal policies naturally transition from exploration to exploitation in finite time, develop a branch-and-bound algorithm for computing these policies, and empirically validate its effectiveness.