Counterfactual Profile Perturbations for Recommendation Explanations: A Reproducibility Study

Meysam Varasteh, Elizabeth McKinnie, Robin Burke

This reproducibility paper explores the counterfactual explanation technique known as Learning to eXplain Recommendations (LXR). Prior work has shown that LXR can reliably identify perturbations that, if applied to a user's profile, cause the user's top ranked item to no longer be recommended, thereby explaining the item's recommendation as a function of the user's rating choices. In this paper, we extend this work in multiple ways. We expand the scope of the original LXR study to look at explanations for items other than the most highly recommended item, finding that LXR is also effective at this version of the task. We consider alternate baselines for LXR, including item popularity and latent factor similarity, and we see that for some tasks these alternatives work surprisingly well. We also examine the impact of item popularity, finding that LXR offers better explanation quality (shorter perturbations) when less popular items are being explained. Finally, we conduct a brute-force exploration of a subset of the perturbation space in order to estimate a lower bound for optimal perturbation size against which LXR and other such methods can be compared.