Greedy Optimized Multileaving for Personalization

Abstract: Personalization plays an important role in many services. To evaluate personalized rankings, online evaluation, such as A/B testing, is widely used today. Recently, multileaving has been found to be an efficient method for evaluating rankings in information retrieval fields. This paper describes the first attempt to optimize the multileaving method for personalization settings. We clarify the challenges of applying this method to personalized rankings. Then, to solve these challenges, we propose greedy optimized multileaving (GOM) with a new credit feedback function. The empirical results showed that GOM was stable for increasing ranking lengths and the number of rankers. We implemented GOM on our actual news recommender systems, and compared its online performance. The results showed that GOM evaluated the personalized rankings precisely, with significantly smaller sample sizes (< 1/10) than A/B testing.