Recommender systems

Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years, and are applied in a variety of applications. The most popular ones are probably movies, music, news, books, research articles, search queries, social tags, and products in general. However, there are also recommender systems for experts, jokes, restaurants, financial services, life insurance, persons (online dating), and twitter followers.

Recommender systems typically produce a list of recommendations in one of two ways – through collaborative or content-based filtering. Collaborative filtering approaches build a model from a user’s past behavior (items previously purchased or selected and/or numerical ratings given to those items) as well as similar decisions made by other users; then use that model to predict items (or ratings for items) that the user may have an interest in. Content-based filtering approaches utilize a series of discrete characteristics of an item in order to recommend additional items with similar properties. These approaches are often combined (see Hybrid Recommender Systems).

The differences between collaborative and content-based filtering can be demonstrated by comparing two popular music recommender systems – Last.fm and Pandora Radio.

• Pandora uses the properties of a song or artist (a subset of the 400 attributes provided by the Music Genome Project) in order to seed a “station” that plays music with similar properties. User feedback is used to refine the station’s results, deemphasizing certain attributes when a user “dislikes” a particular song and emphasizing other attributes when a user “likes” a song. This is an example of a content-based approach.
• Last.fm creates a “station” of recommended songs by observing what bands and individual tracks that the user has listened to on a regular basis and comparing those against the listening behavior of other users. Last.fm will play tracks that do not appear in the user’s library, but are often played by other users with similar interests. As this approach leverages the behavior of users, it is an example of a collaborative filtering technique.

Each type of system has its own strengths and weaknesses. In the above example, Last.fm requires a large amount of information on a user in order to make accurate recommendations. This is an example of the cold start problem, and is common in collaborative filtering systems.While Pandora needs very little information to get started, it is far more limited in scope (for example, it can only make recommendations that are similar to the original seed).

Recommender systems are a useful alternative to search algorithms since they help users discover items they might not have found by themselves. Interestingly enough, recommender systems are often implemented using search engines indexing non-traditional data.

Montaner provides the first overview of recommender systems, from an intelligent agents perspective. Adomavicius provides a new overview of recommender systems. Herlocker provides an additional overview of evaluation techniques for recommender systems, and Beel et al. discuss the problems of offline evaluations. They also provide a literature survey on research paper recommender systems.

From: Wikipedia