An exploration of improving collaborative recommender systems via user-item subgroups

B Xu, J Bu, C Chen, D Cai - … of the 21st international conference on …, 2012 - dl.acm.org
B Xu, J Bu, C Chen, D Cai
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web, 2012dl.acm.org
Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most successful recommendation approaches. It
typically associates a user with a group of like-minded users based on their preferences
over all the items, and recommends to the user those items enjoyed by others in the group.
However we find that two users with similar tastes on one item subset may have totally
different tastes on another set. In other words, there exist many user-item subgroups each
consisting of a subset of items and a group of like-minded users on these items. It is more …
Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the most successful recommendation approaches. It typically associates a user with a group of like-minded users based on their preferences over all the items, and recommends to the user those items enjoyed by others in the group. However we find that two users with similar tastes on one item subset may have totally different tastes on another set. In other words, there exist many user-item subgroups each consisting of a subset of items and a group of like-minded users on these items. It is more natural to make preference predictions for a user via the correlated subgroups than the entire user-item matrix. In this paper, to find meaningful subgroups, we formulate the Multiclass Co-Clustering (MCoC) problem and propose an effective solution to it. Then we propose an unified framework to extend the traditional CF algorithms by utilizing the subgroups information for improving their top-N recommendation performance. Our approach can be seen as an extension of traditional clustering CF models. Systematic experiments on three real world data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
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