EigenRank: a ranking-oriented approach to collaborative filtering

ABSTRACT

A recommender system must be able to suggest items that are likely to be preferred by the user. In most systems, the degree of preference is represented by a rating score. Given a database of users' past ratings on a set of items, traditional collaborative filtering algorithms are based on predicting the potential ratings that a user would assign to the unrated items so that they can be ranked by the predicted ratings to produce a list of recommended items. In this paper, we propose a collaborative filtering approach that addresses the item ranking problem directly by modeling user preferences derived from the ratings. We measure the similarity between users based on the correlation between their rankings of the items rather than the rating values and propose new collaborative filtering algorithms for ranking items based on the preferences of similar users. Experimental results on real world movie rating data sets show that the proposed approach outperforms traditional collaborative filtering algorithms significantly on the NDCG measure for evaluating ranked results.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Retrieval tasks and goals

      • Document filtering

      • Information extraction