Comparison of Recommender System Algorithms Focusing on the New-item and User-bias Problem

Recommender systems are used by an increasing number of e-commerce websites to help the customers to find suitable products from a large database. One of the most popular techniques for recommender systems is collaborative filtering. Several collaborative filtering algorithms claim to be able to solve i) the new-item problem, when a new item is introduced to the system and only a few or no ratings have been provided; and ii) the user-bias problem, when it is not possible to distinguish two items, which possess the same historical ratings from users, but different contents. However, for most algorithms, evaluations are not satisfying due to the lack of suitable evaluation metrics and protocols, thus, a fair comparison of the algorithms is not possible. In this paper, we introduce new methods and metrics for evaluating the userbias and new-item problem for collaborative filtering algorithms which consider attributes. In addition, we conduct empirical analysis and compare the results ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GFKL
• Authors: Stefan Hauger, Karen H. L. Tso, Lars Schmidt-Thieme
• Keywords: Collaborative filtering Algorithms, Data Mining, GFKL 2007, Recommender Systems, Suitable Evaluation Metrics