FARM: A Fairness-Aware Recommendation Method for High Visibility and Low Visibility Mobile APPs

The number of mobile applications(APPs) has increased dramatically with the development of mobile Internet. It becomes challenging for users to identify these APPs they are really interested in. Existing mobile APP recommendation methods focus on learning users' preference and recommending high visibility APPs. However, some low visibility APPs may satisfy users and even surprise them. If those low visibility APPs have the opportunity to show to the user, they will not only improve the user's satisfaction, but also provide a fair competitive market for APP providers. Furthermore, it will improve the vitality of the APP market. To this end, we present a fairness-aware APP recommendation method named FARM. The principal study of this method emphasizes on the fairness issue during the recommendation process. In this method, APP candidates are divided into high visibility and low visibility APPs, and implement recommendation algorithm respectively. For low visibility APPs, we set a fairness factor for everyone, and use the user's latest feedback to make a dynamic adjustment. Based on the fairness factor, the recommendation is implemented by roulette-wheel. For high visibility APPs, we employ the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process to implement the recommendation. The evaluation results show that FARM outperforms baselines in terms of recommendation fairness.