Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Wisdom Of The Few: A Collaborative Filtering Approach Based On Expert Opinions From The Web, Xavier Amatriain, Neal Lathia, Josep M. Pujol, Haewoon Kwak, Nuria. Oliver

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Nearest-neighbor collaborative filtering provides a successful means of generating recommendations for web users. However, this approach suffers from several shortcomings, including data sparsity and noise, the cold-start problem, and scalability. In this work, we present a novel method for recommending items to users based on expert opinions. Our method is a variation of traditional collaborative filtering: rather than applying a nearest neighbor algorithm to the user-rating data, predictions are computed using a set of expert neighbors from an independent dataset, whose opinions are weighted according to their similarity to the user. This method promises to address some of the weaknesses …