Exploiting the diversity of user preferences for recommendation

  • Authors:
  • Saúl Vargas;Pablo Castells

  • Affiliations:
  • Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain;Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Open Research Areas in Information Retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Diversity as a quality dimension for Recommender Systems has been receiving increasing attention in the last few years. This has been paralleled by an intense strand of research on diversity in search tasks, and in fact converging views on diversity theories and techniques from Information Retrieval and Recommender Systems have been put forward in recent work. In this paper we research diversity not only as a target property for a recommender system, but as an element in the input data, within and between user behaviors, that a recommender system can leverage to enhance the quality of its output in terms of the balance between accuracy and diversity. We propose an adaptation of search result diversification methods to recommender systems based on query reformulation: we identify the diversity within user profiles and generate partial recommendations based on homogeneous subsets of user preferences (sub-profiles), which we combine later to produce a final recommendation. We report experiments on movie and music recommendation datasets showing that our approach improves indeed the quality of state-of-the-art recommenders, and is competitive against diversification methods that use explicitly item categories as the units for diversification. Our approach shows further advantages in cases where the high cardinality of the explicit category spaces can pose a problem in terms of computational cost.