Unifying collaborative and content-based filtering

Collaborative and content-based filtering are two paradigms that have been applied in the context of recommender systems and user preference prediction. This paper proposes a novel, unified approach that systematically integrates all available training information such as past user-item ratings as well as attributes of items or users to learn a prediction function. The key ingredient of our method is the design of a suitable kernel or similarity function between user-item pairs that allows simultaneous generalization across the user and item dimensions. We propose an on-line algorithm (JRank) that generalizes perceptron learning. Experimental results on the EachMovie data set show significant improvements over standard approaches.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICML
• Authors: Justin Basilico, Thomas Hofmann
• Keywords: ICML 2004, Machine Learning, Prediction Function, Similarity Function, User Preference Prediction