A collection of datasets crawled from Amazon, "Amazon reviews", is popular in the evaluation of recommendation systems. These datasets, however, contain redundancies (duplicated recommendations for variants of certain items). These redundancies went unnoticed in earlier use of these datasets and thus incurred to a certain extent wrong conclusions in the evaluation of algorithms tested on these datasets. We analyze the nature and amount of these redundancies and their impact on the evaluation of recommendation methods. While the general and obvious conclusion is that redundancies should be avoided and datasets should be carefully preprocessed, we observe more specifically that their impact depends on the complexity of the methods. With this work, we also want to raise the awareness of the importance of data quality, model understanding, and appropriate evaluation.
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