Donation dashboard: a recommender system for donation portfolios

  • Authors:
  • Tavi Nathanson;Ephrat Bitton;Ken Goldberg

  • Affiliations:
  • University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Recommender systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

In this paper we present Donation Dashboard, a system that recommends non-profit organizations to users in the form of a portfolio of donation amounts. Recommendations are made using our Eigentaste 2.0 constant-time collaborative filtering algorithm in combination with a new method for generating a weighted portfolio of recommendations. The key challenge is to generate a customized portfolio that does not necessarily exclude items already rated by the user. Under our method, the weights for items in the portfolio that have not yet been rated by the user are normalized factors of their predicted ratings, and the weights for items previously rated by the user are normalized factors of the actual ratings. Donation Dashboard 1.0 launched in April 2008, and as of May 8 2009 we have collected over 59,000 ratings of 70 nonprofit organizations from over 3,800 users. In this working paper we describe our experience developing Donation Dashboard, including the design of the system and our new method for portfolio generation. We use Normalized Mean Absolute Error (NMAE) to measure the accuracy of Eigentaste using our dataset of non-profit organization ratings and we compare that with the global mean algorithm. We analyze the data collected since the launch of the site, and we have made our dataset available to the public. Donation Dashboard and the Donation Dashboard dataset are accessible at: http://dd.berkeley.edu and http://dd.berkeley.edu/dataset