Recommender Systems & Collaborative Filtering
Recommender Systems & Collaborative Filtering
Collaborative Filtering
What is a Recommender System
• E.g. music, books and movies
• In eCommerce recommend items
• In eLearning recommend content
• In search and navigation recommend links
• We concentrate on CB and CF
Content-Based Recommenders
• Find me things that I liked in the past.
• Machine learns preferences through user
feedback and builds a user profile
George 2 3 4
Mark 4 5 2
Peter 4 5
Observations
• Can construct a vector for each user
(where 0 implies an item is unrated)
– E.g. for Alex: <1,0,5,4>
– E.g. for Peter <0,0,4,5>
• On average, user vectors are sparse,
since users rate (or buy) only a few items.
• Vector similarity or correlation can be used
to find nearest neighbour.
– E.g. Alex closest to Peter, then to George.
Case Study – Amazon.com
• Customers who bought this item also bought:
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MovieLens Recommendations
Challenges for CF
• Sparsity problem – when many of the items have not been
rated by many people, it may be hard to find ‘like minded’
people.
• First rater problem – what happens if an item has not been
rated by anyone.
• Privacy problems.