Recommender systems using linear classifiers

  • Authors:
  • Tong Zhang;Vijay S. Iyengar

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM Research Division, T. J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY;IBM Research Division, T. J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, NY

  • Venue:
  • The Journal of Machine Learning Research
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Recommender systems use historical data on user preferences and other available data on users (for example, demographics) and items (for example, taxonomy) to predict items a new user might like. Applications of these methods include recommending items for purchase and personalizing the browsing experience on a web-site. Collaborative filtering methods have focused on using just the history of user preferences to make the recommendations. These methods have been categorized as memory-based if they operate over the entire data to make predictions and as model-based if they use the data to build a model which is then used for predictions. In this paper, we propose the use of linear classifiers in a model-based recommender system. We compare our method with another model-based method using decision trees and with memory-based methods using data from various domains. Our experimental results indicate that these linear models are well suited for this application. They outperform a commonly proposed memory-based method in accuracy and also have a better tradeoff between off-line and on-line computational requirements.