Rémy Poulain, Fabien Tarissan
In Information Processing & Management, 57(2), Elsevier, 2020
Whether to deal with issues related to information ranking (e.g. search engines) or content recommendation (on social networks, for instance), algorithms are at the core of processes that select which information is made visible. Such algorithmic choices have a strong impact on users’ activity de facto, and therefore on their access to information. This raises the question of how to measure the quality of the choices algorithms make and their impact on users. As a first step in that direction, this paper presents a framework with which to analyze the diversity of information accessed by users in the context of musical content. The approach adopted centers on the representation of user activity through a tripartite graph that maps users to products and products to categories. In turn, conducting random walks in this structure makes it possible to analyze how categories catch users’ attention and how this attention is distributed. Building upon this distribution, we propose a new index referred to as the (calibrated) herfindahl diversity, which is aimed at quantifying the extent to which this distribution is diverse and representative of existing categories. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to connect the output of random walks on graphs with diversity indexes. We demonstrate the benefit of such an approach by applying our index to two datasets that record user activity on online platforms involving musical content. The results are threefold. First, we show that our index can discriminate between different user behaviors. Second, we shed some light on a saturation phenomenon in the diversity of users’ attention. Finally, we show that the lack of diversity observed in the datasets derives from exogenous factors related to the heterogeneous popularity of music styles, as opposed to internal factors such as recurrent user behaviors.