1 Recommender Systems Information Systems M Prof. Paolo Ciaccia http://www-db.deis.unibo.it/courses/SI-M/ Recommender Systems A recommender system (RS) helps people to evaluate the, potentially huge, number of alternatives offered by a Web site In their simplest form RS’s recommend to their users personalized and ranked lists of items Provide consumers with information to help them decide which items to purchase Given a set of users and items (documents, products, …) recommend items to a user based on past behavior of this and other users additional information on users/items A multitude of applications, and a big market! E-commerce Medical applications (e.g., matching patients to doctors) Customer Relationship Management (e.g., matching customer problems to experts) Recommender Systems 2 Sistemi Informativi M
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Recommender SystemsInformation Systems M
Prof. Paolo Ciaccia
http://www-db.deis.unibo.it/courses/SI-M/
Recommender Systems
� A recommender system (RS) helps people to evaluate the, potentially huge,
number of alternatives offered by a Web site
� In their simplest form RS’s recommend to their users personalized and ranked lists of items
� Provide consumers with information to help them decide which items to purchase
� Given a set of users and items (documents, products, …) recommend items
to a user based on
� past behavior of this and other users
� additional information on users/items
� A multitude of applications, and a big market!
� E-commerce
� Medical applications (e.g., matching patients to doctors)
� Customer Relationship Management (e.g., matching customer problems to experts)
Recommender Systems 2Sistemi Informativi M
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What book should I buy?
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What movie should I watch?
• The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) provides information about actors, films, television shows, television stars, video games…
• Owned by Amazon.com since 1998 • 796,328 titles and 2,127,371 people• More than 50M users per month
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The Netflix prize (1)
� Netflix is a US online movie rental service
� Over 100K titles and 55 million DVDs total
� A proprietary recommendation system called “Cinematch”
� Approximately 60% of Netflix members select their movies based on movie
recommendations
In October 2006, Netflix announced it would have paid a $1 million to whoever
created a movie-recommending algorithm 10% better than Cinematch
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12.01.2011
The Netflix prize (2)
� Within two weeks, Netflix received 169 submissions, including three that
were slightly superior to Cinematch
� After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the
top scorers were almost halfway to the goal
� Three years later, on 21st of September 2009, Netflix announced the winner
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What news should I read?
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Where should I spend my vacation?
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5
Remarkable examples
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Amazon.com Books, movies, music
CDNOW.com Music
Ebay.com (feedback forms) Anything
Reel.com Movies
Barnes & Noble Books
Method
Systems
JinniTaste
Kid
Nano
crow
d
Clerk
dogs
Critic
kerIMDb
Flixst
er
Movi
elens
Netfli
x
Shaza
m
Pand
ora
LastF
M
YooC
hoos
e
Think
Analy
tics
Itune
s
Amaz
on
Collaborative Filtering v v v v v v v v v v v v
Content-Based
Techniquesv v v v v v v v v v v
Knowledge-Based
Techniquesv v v v v v v
Ontologies and
Semantic Web
Technologies for
Recommender Systems
v v v
Hybrid Techniques v v v v v v v
Context Dependent
Recommender Systemsv v v v v v
Technologies
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Inputs to a RS
� Behavior of user in past “transactions”
� which items viewed/purchase
� content/attributes of items
� pages bookmarked
� explicit ratings on items
� Context (used in context-based recommendations)
� what the user appears to be doing now
� Role/domain
� additional info about users, items, …
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Content-Based Recommendation
� In content-based recommendations the system tries to recommend items
that matches the user profile
� The profile is based on items that the user liked in the past or on explicit
interests that s/he defines
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New booksUser Profile
Recommender
Systems
Match
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Implementing content-based RS’s
� The basic idea is borrowed from the Vector Space Model
� Each item is characterized by a set of (weighted) features
� Movie: actors, director, title, …
� Weight: use tf.idf
� Also works for “unstructured” data (web pages, docs, etc.)
� The user profile is built using user history
� E.g., a vector representing the relevance of features/keywords for that user
� Either implicit or explicit “rating of features” (or both)
� Cosine similarity can be used to match the user profile with an item vector
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Pros and cons of content-based RS’s
� Able to recommend new and unpopular items
� No need for data on other users
� Can provide explanations of recommended items
� Limited content analysis
� Not always easy to find the appropriate features to use
� Overspecialization
� Can only recommend items similar to previously seen/rated ones
� Further, items too similar to some the user already knows might not be of interest (e.g., news articles)
� New users
� How to build a profile?
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Collaborative filtering (CF)
� Unlike content-based recommendation methods, CF recommender systems
try to predict the utility of items for a particular user based on the items
previously rated by other users
� Two basic variants of CF:
User-based: To predict a user’s opinion for an item, use the opinion of similar
users, where similarity between users depends on their opinions for other
items
Item-based: as in content-based RS’s, the assumption is that a user is likely to
have the same opinion for similar items; however, now similarity between
items depends on how other users have rated them
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User-based CF
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Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 Item 5
User 1 8 1?
2 7
User 2 2?
5 7 5
User 3 5 4 7 4 7
User 4 7 1 7 3 8
User 5 1 7 4 6 5
User 6 8 3 8 3 7
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Similarity between users: simple way
� Only consider items both users have rated
� For each item, compute the difference in the users’ ratings
� If Item j has been rated by both User 1 and User 2: