Incorporating Uncertainty Quantification for the Performance Improvement of Academic Recommenders

Deep learning is widely used in many real-life applications. Despite their remarkable performance accuracies, deep learning networks are often poorly calibrated, which could be harmful in risk-sensitive scenarios. Uncertainty quantification offers a way to evaluate the reliability and trustworthiness of deep-learning-based model predictions. In this work, we introduced uncertainty quantification to our virtual research assistant recommender platform through both Monte Carlo dropout ensemble techniques. We also proposed a new formula to incorporate the uncertainty estimates into our recommendation models. The experiments were carried out on two different components of the recommender platform (i.e., a BERT-based grant recommender and a temporal graph network (TGN)-based collaborator recommender) using real-life datasets. The recommendation results were compared in terms of both recommender metrics (AUC, AP, etc.) and the calibration/reliability metric (ECE). With uncertainty quantification, we were able to better understand the behavior of our regular recommender outputs; while our BERT-based grant recommender tends to be overconfident with its outputs, our TGN-based collaborator recommender tends to be underconfident in producing matching probabilities. Initial case studies also showed that our proposed model with uncertainty quantification adjustment from ensemble gave the best-calibrated results together with the desirable recommender performance.