14 Kg of CO2: Analyzing the Carbon Footprint and Performance of Session-Based Recommendation Algorithms
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Date
2025
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Publisher
Springer, Cham
Abstract
Green AI aims to develop accurate AI models that are also sustainable without compromising the environment, especially in terms of carbon emissions. There are few studies on this topic in recommender systems, so we analyzed the trade-offs between recommendation performance and carbon footprint in session-based recommender systems. We use five public e-commerce datasets to predict the next item a user will interact with based solely on their past click events. The GRU4Rec algorithm and five unofficial reimplementations in different deep learning frameworks (Theano, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, and Reckpack) are evaluated. The results indicate a strong effect of the loss function and dataset size on the carbon footprint without significantly affecting the accuracy metrics. We show evidence that the implementation choice for the same algorithm strongly affects the CO2 emitted, and optimized implementations do not sacrifice recommendation efficiency, which should be considered when choosing a framework or implementation for an algorithm.
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Keywords
Information systems, Ecologic recommender systems