Learning users' interests by quality classification in market-based recommender systems
OA Location
Author(s)
Wei, YZ
Moreau, L
Jennings, NR
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Recommender systems are widely used to cope with the problem of information overload and, to date, many recommendation methods have been developed. However, no one technique is best for all users in all situations. To combat this, we have previously developed a market-based recommender system that allows multiple agents (each representing a different recommendation method or system) to compete with one another to present their best recommendations to the user. In our system, the marketplace encourages good recommendations by rewarding the corresponding agents who supplied them according to the users' ratings of their suggestions. Moreover, we have theoretically shown how our system incites the agents to bid in a manner that ensures only the best recommendations are presented. To do this effectively in practice, however, each agent needs to be able to classify its recommendations into different internal quality levels, learn the users' interests for these different levels, and then adapt its bidding behavior for the various levels accordingly. To this end, in this paper, we develop a reinforcement learning and Boltzmann exploration strategy that the recommending agents can exploit for these tasks. We then demonstrate that this strategy does indeed help the agents to effectively obtain information about the users' interests which, in turn, speeds up the market convergence and enables the system to rapidly highlight the best recommendations.
Date Issued
2005-10-31
Date Acceptance
2005-10-31
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2005, 17 (12), pp.1678-1688
ISSN
1558-2191
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
1678
End Page
1688
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Volume
17
Issue
12
Copyright Statement
© 2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science, Information Systems
Engineering, Electrical & Electronic
Computer Science
Engineering
COMPUTER SCIENCE, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
COMPUTER SCIENCE, INFORMATION SYSTEMS
ENGINEERING, ELECTRICAL & ELECTRONIC
information filtering
machine learning
recommender systems
markets
Information Systems
08 Information And Computing Sciences
Publication Status
Published