Engineering Commons^™

Mining Semantic Knowledge Graphs To Add Explainability To Black Box Recommender Systems, Mohammed Alshammari, Olfa Nasraoui, Scott Sanders

Faculty Scholarship

Recommender systems are being increasingly used to predict the preferences of users on online platforms and recommend relevant options that help them cope with information overload. In particular, modern model-based collaborative filtering algorithms, such as latent factor models, are considered state-of-the-art in recommendation systems. Unfortunately, these black box systems lack transparency, as they provide little information about the reasoning behind their predictions. White box systems, in contrast, can, by nature, easily generate explanations. However, their predictions are less accurate than sophisticated black box models. Recent research has demonstrated that explanations are an essential component in bringing the powerful predictions of …