Reliable Recommender Systems Research

I have spent considerable effort implementing software and conducting research to help promote reproducibility and reliability in recommender systems research. This has most notably resulted in the LensKit software, an open-source toolkit for recommender systems research. I am still maintaining this software and am active in promoting reproducibility in the RecSys research community.

Funding

2018–2023: NSF award 1751278, $482,081: CAREER: User-Based Simulation Methods for Quantifying Sources of Error and Bias in Recommender Systems
Texas State University Research Enhancement Program: Temporal Evaluation of Recommender Systems ($8000, 2015)

Publications

Mucun Tian and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2020. Estimating Error and Bias in Offline Evaluation Results. Short paper in Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Computer-Human Interaction and Information Retrieval (CHIIR '20). ACM, 5 pp. 10.1145/3343413.3378004. arXiv:2001.09455 [cs.IR]. Acceptance rate: 47%.

Michael D. Ekstrand. 2018. The LKPY Package for Recommender Systems Experiments: Next-Generation Tools and Lessons Learned from the LensKit Project. Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations 147. Boise State University. Presented at the REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender Systems, a workshop at RecSys 2018. 10.18122/cs_facpubs/147/boisestate. arXiv:1809.03125 [cs.IR]. Cited 3 times.

Mucun Tian and Michael D. Ekstrand. 2018. Monte Carlo Estimates of Evaluation Metric Error and Bias. Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations 148. Boise State University. Presented at the REVEAL 2018 Workshop on Offline Evaluation for Recommender Systems, a workshop at RecSys 2018. 10.18122/cs_facpubs/148/boisestate. NSF PAR 10074452.

Nicola Ferro, Norbert Fuhr, Gregory Grefenstette, Joseph A. Konstan, Pablo Castells, Elizabeth M. Daly, Thierry Declerck, Michael D. Ekstrand, Werner Geyer, Julio Gonzalo, Tsvi Kuflik, Krister Lindén, Bernardo Magnini, Jian-Yun Nie, Raffaele Perego, Bracha Shapira, Ian Soboroff, Nava Tintarev, Karin Verspoor, Martijn C. Willemsen, and Justin Zobel. 2018. The Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop on Performance Modeling and Prediction. SIGIR Forum 52(1) (June 2018), 91–101. 10.1145/3274784.3274789. Cited 6 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand and Vaibhav Mahant. 2017. Sturgeon and the Cool Kids: Problems with Random Decoys for Top-N Recommender Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 30th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference. AAAI, pp. 639–644. Cited 2 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand and Michael Ludwig. 2016. Dependency Injection with Static Analysis and Context-Aware Policy. Journal of Object Technology 15(1) (February 2016), 1:1–31. 10.5381/jot.2016.15.5.a1. Cited 2 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand. 2014. Towards Recommender Engineering: Tools and Experiments in Recommender Differences. Ph.D thesis, University of Minnesota. HDL 11299/165307. Cited 3 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand. 2014. Building Open-Source Tools for Reproducible Research and Education. At Sharing, Re-use, and Circulation of Resources in Cooperative Scientific Work, a workshop at CSCW 2014.

Michael D. Ekstrand, Michael Ludwig, Joseph A. Konstan, and John T. Riedl. 2011. Rethinking The Recommender Research Ecosystem: Reproducibility, Openness, and LensKit. In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '11). ACM, pp. 133–140. 10.1145/2043932.2043958. Acceptance rate: 27% (20% for oral presentation, which this received). Cited 108 times.

Michael D. Ekstrand, Michael Ludwig, Jack Kolb, and John T. Riedl. 2011. LensKit: A Modular Recommender Framework. Demo recorded in Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '11). ACM, pp. 349-350. 10.1145/2043932.2044001. Cited 22 times.

Justin J. Levandoski, Michael D. Ekstrand, Michael J. Ludwig, Ahmad Eldawy, Mohamed F. Mokbel, and John T. Riedl. 2011. RecBench: Benchmarks for Evaluating Performance of Recommender System Architectures. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 4(11) (August 2011), 911–920. Acceptance rate: 18%. Cited 8 times.