The Challenging Reproducibility Task in Recommender Systems Research between Traditional and Deep Learning Models

Recommender Systems have shown to be a useful tool for reducing over-choice and providing accurate, personalized suggestions. The large variety of available recommendation algorithms, splitting techniques, assessment protocols, metrics, and tasks, on the other hand, has made thorough experimental evaluation extremely difficult. Elliot is a comprehensive framework for recommendation with the goal of running and reproducing a whole experimental pipeline from a single configuration file. The framework uses a variety of ways to load, filter, and divide data. Elliot optimizes hyper-parameters for a variety of recommendation algorithms, then chooses the best models, compares them to baselines, computes metrics ranging from accuracy to beyond-accuracy, bias, and fairness, and does statistical analysis. The aim is to provide researchers with a tool to ease all the experimental evaluation phases (and make them reproducible), from data reading to results collection. Elliot is freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/sisinflab/elliot.