This paper presents an overview of the field of recommender systems and describes the current generation of recommendation methods that are usually classified into the following three main categories: content-based, collaborative, and hybrid recommendation approaches. This paper also describes various limitations of current recommendation methods and discusses possible extensions that can improve recommendation capabilities and make recommender systems applicable to an even broader range of applications. These extensions include, among others, an improvement of understanding of users and items, incorporation of the contextual information into the recommendation process, support for multcriteria ratings, and a provision of more flexible and less intrusive types of recommendations.

Abstract—This work presents a new perspective on characterizing the similarity between elements of a database or, more generally, nodes of a weighted and undirected graph. It is based on a Markov-chain model of random walk through the database. More precisely, we compute quantities (the average commute time, the pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix of the graph, etc.) that provide similarities between any pair of nodes, having the nice property of increasing when the number of paths connecting those elements increases and when the “length ” of paths decreases. It turns out that the square root of the average commute time is a Euclidean distance and that the pseudoinverse of the Laplacian matrix is a kernel matrix (its elements are inner products closely related to commute times). A principal component analysis (PCA) of the graph is introduced for computing the subspace projection of the node vectors in a manner that preserves as much variance as possible in terms of the Euclidean commute-time distance. This graph PCA provides a nice interpretation to the “Fiedler vector, ” widely used for graph partitioning. The model is evaluated on a collaborativerecommendation task where suggestions are made about which movies people should watch based upon what they watched in the past. Experimental results on the MovieLens database show that the Laplacian-based similarities perform well in comparison with other methods. The model, which nicely fits into the so-called “statistical relational learning ” framework, could also be used to compute document or word similarities, and, more generally, it could be applied to machine-learning and pattern-recognition tasks involving a relational database. Index Terms—Graph analysis, graph and database mining, collaborative recommendation, graph kernels, spectral clustering, Fiedler vector, proximity measures, statistical relational learning. 1

Memory-based approaches for collaborative filtering identify the similarity between two users by comparing their ratings on a set of items. In the past, the memory-based approaches have been shown to suffer from two fundamental problems: data sparsity and difficulty in scalability. Alternatively, the model-based approaches have been proposed to alleviate these problems, but these approaches tends to limit the range of users. In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines the advantages of these two kinds of approaches by introducing a smoothing-based method. In our approach, clusters generated from the training data provide the basis for data smoothing and neighborhood selection. As a result, we provide higher accuracy as well as increased efficiency in recommendations. Empirical studies on two datasets (EachMovie and MovieLens) show that our new proposed approach consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art collaborative filtering algorithms.

Memory-based methods for collaborative filtering predict new ratings by averaging (weighted) ratings between, respectively, pairs of similar users or items. In practice, a large number of ratings from similar users or similar items are not available, due to the sparsity inherent to rating data. Consequently, prediction quality can be poor. This paper reformulates the memory-based collaborative filtering problem in a generative probabilistic framework, treating individual user-item ratings as predictors of missing ratings. The final rating is estimated by fusing predictions from three sources: predictions based on ratings of the same item by other users, predictions based on different item ratings made by the same user, and, third, ratings predicted based on data from other but similar users rating other but similar items. Existing user-based and item-based approaches correspond to the two simple cases of our framework. The complete model is however more robust to data sparsity, because the different types of ratings are used in concert, while additional ratings from similar users towards similar items are employed as a background model to smooth the predictions. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed methods are indeed more robust against data sparsity and give better recommendations.

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Recommender systems can provide valuable services in a digital library environment, as demonstrated by its commercial success in book, movie, and music industries. One of the most commonlyused and successful recommendation algorithms is collaborative filtering, which explores the correlations within user-item interactions to infer user interests and preferences. However, the recommendation quality of collaborative filtering approaches is greatly limited by the data sparsity problem. To alleviate this problem we have previously proposed graph-based algorithms to explore transitive user-item associations. In this paper, we extend the idea of analyzing user-item interactions as graphs and employ link prediction approaches proposed in the recent network modeling literature for making collaborative filtering recommendations. We have adapted a wide range of linkage measures for making recommendations. Our preliminary experimental results based on a book recommendation dataset show that some of these measures achieved significantly better performance than standard collaborative filtering algorithms.

Social tagging is the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords, to annotate and categorize information items (songs, pictures, web links, products etc.). Collaborative tagging systems recommend tags to users based on what tags other users have used for the same items, aiming to develop a common consensus about which tags best describe an item. However, they fail to provide appropriate tag recommendations, because: (i) users may have different interests for an information item and (ii) information items may have multiple facets. In contrast to the current tag recommendation algorithms, our approach develops a unified framework to model the three types of entities that exist in a social tagging system: users, items and tags. These data is represented by a 3-order tensor, on which latent semantic analysis and dimensionality reduction is performed using the Higher Order Singular Value Decomposition (HOSVD) technique. We perform experimental comparison of the proposed method against two state-of-the-art tag recommendations algorithms with two real data sets (Last.fm and BibSonomy). Our results show significant improvements in terms of effectiveness measured through recall/precision.

Although Recommender Systems have been comprehensively analyzed in the past decade, the study of social-based recommender systems just started. In this paper, aiming at providing a general method for improving recommender systems by incorporating social network information, we propose a matrix factorization framework with social regularization. The contributions of this paper are four-fold: (1) We elaborate how social network information can benefit recommender systems; (2) We interpret the differences between social-based recommender systems and trust-aware recommender systems; (3) We coin the term Social Regularization to represent the social constraints on recommender systems, and we systematically illustrate how to design a matrix factorization objective function with social regularization; and (4) The proposed method is quite general, which can be easily extended to incorporate other contextual information, like social tags, etc. The empirical analysis on two large datasets demonstrates that our approaches outperform other state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract. Collaborative Filtering (CF), the prevalent recommendation approach, has been successfully used to identify users that can be characterized as “similar ” according to their logged history of prior transactions. However, the applicability of CF is limited due to the sparsity problem, which refers to a situation that transactional data are lacking or are insufficient. In an attempt to provide high-quality recommendations even when data are sparse, we propose a method for alleviating sparsity using trust inferences. Trust inferences are transitive associations between users in the context of an underlying social network and are valuable sources of additional information that help dealing with the sparsity and the cold-start problems. A trust computational model has been developed that permits to define the subjective notion of trust by applying confidence and uncertainty properties to network associations. We compare our method with the classic CF that does not consider any transitive associations. Our experimental results indicate that our method of trust inferences significantly improves the quality performance of the classic CF method. 1

In general web search engines, such as Google and Yahoo! Search, document relevance for the given query and item authority are two major components of the ranking system. However, many information search tools in ecommerce sites ignore item authority in their ranking systems. In part, this may stem from the relative difficulty of generating item authorities due to the different characteristics of documents (or items) between ecommerce sites and the web. Links between documents in an ecommerce site often represent relationship rather than recommendation. For example, two documents (items) are connected since both are produced by the same company. We propose a new ranking method, which combines recommender systems with information search tools for better search and browsing. Our method uses a collaborative filtering algorithm to generate personal item authorities for each user and combines them with item proximities for better ranking. To demonstrate our approach, we build a prototype movie search engine called MAD6 (Movies, Actors and Directors; 6 degrees of separation).