Journal article

The power of ground user in recommender systems

  • Zhou, Yanbo Institute of Information Economy, Alibaba Business College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Lü, Linyuan Institute of Information Economy, Alibaba Business College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Liu, Weiping Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Zhang, Jianlin Institute of Information Economy, Alibaba Business College, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China - Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
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    02.08.2013
Published in:
  • PLoS ONE. - 2013, vol. 8, no. 8, p. e70094
English Accuracy and diversity are two important aspects to evaluate the performance of recommender systems. Two diffusion-based methods were proposed respectively inspired by the mass diffusion (MD) and heat conduction (HC) processes on networks. It has been pointed out that MD has high recommendation accuracy yet low diversity, while HC succeeds in seeking out novel or niche items but with relatively low accuracy. The accuracy-diversity dilemma is a long-term challenge in recommender systems. To solve this problem, we introduced a background temperature by adding a ground user who connects to all the items in the user-item bipartite network. Performing the HC algorithm on the network with ground user (GHC), it showed that the accuracy can be largely improved while keeping the diversity. Furthermore, we proposed a weighted form of the ground user (WGHC) by assigning some weights to the newly added links between the ground user and the items. By turning the weight as a free parameter, an optimal value subject to the highest accuracy is obtained. Experimental results on three benchmark data sets showed that the WGHC outperforms the state-of-the-art method MD for both accuracy and diversity.
Faculty
Faculté des sciences et de médecine
Department
Département de Physique
Language
  • English
Classification
Physics
License
License undefined
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/303216
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