Learning to recommend from positive evidence

In recent years, many systems and approaches for recommending information, products or other objects have been developed. In these systems, often machine learning methods that need training input to acquire a user interest profile are used. Such methods typically need positive and negative evidence of the user’s interests. To obtain both kinds of evidence, many systems make users rate relevant objects explicitly. Others merely observe the user’s behavior, which fairly obviously yields positive evidence; in order to be able to apply the standard learning methods, these systems mostly use heuristics that attempt to find also negative evidence in observed behavior. In this paper, we present several approaches to learning interest profiles from positive evidence only, as it is contained in observed user behavior. Thus, both the problem of interrupting the user for ratings and the problem of somewhat artificially determining negative evidence are avoided. The learning approaches were d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Ingo Schwab, Wolfgang Pohl, Ivan Koychev
• Keywords: IUI 2000, Learning Methods, Negative Evidence, Positive Evidence, Software Engineering