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

  • Authors:
  • Bin Xu;Jiajun Bu;Chun Chen;Deng Cai

  • Affiliations:
  • Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Service Robot, College of Computer Science Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Service Robot, College of Computer Science Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Service Robot, College of Computer Science Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China;State Key Lab of CAD&CG College of Computer Science Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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.