Papers › Beyond NDCG: behavioral testing of recommender systems with RecList

Beyond NDCG: behavioral testing of recommender systems with RecList

18 Nov 2021arXiv:2111.09963archive 2025-07-28

Patrick John Chia, Jacopo Tagliabue, Federico Bianchi, Chloe He, Brian Ko

As with most Machine Learning systems, recommender systems are typically evaluated through performance metrics computed over held-out data points. However, real-world behavior is undoubtedly nuanced: ad hoc error analysis and deployment-specific tests must be employed to ensure the desired quality in actual deployments. In this paper, we propose RecList, a behavioral-based testing methodology. RecList organizes recommender systems by use case and introduces a general plug-and-play procedure to scale up behavioral testing. We demonstrate its capabilities by analyzing known algorithms and black-box commercial systems, and we release RecList as an open source, extensible package for the community.

PaperPDFCode

Code

jacopotagliabue/reclist officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
reclist/evalrs-cikm-2022 mentioned on GitHub report
reclist/evalrs-kdd-2023 mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Recommendation Systems

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

HOC

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections