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Advances in Collaborative Filtering

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Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) methods produce recommendations based on usage patterns without the need of exogenous information about items or users. CF algorithms have shown great prediction quality both in academic research and in industrial applications. This chapter surveys core methods in the field. Matrix factorization techniques, which became a first choice for implementing CF, are described together with other innovations. We also describe several extensions that bring competitive accuracy into neighborhood methods, which used to dominate the field. The chapter demonstrates how to utilize temporal models and implicit feedback to extend model accuracy. In passing, we illustrate the use of CF algorithms on the Netflix Prize competition. The CF methods discussed in this chapter have been proposed a decade ago but still show state-of-the art accuracy in recent studies. The modeling patterns identified in this chapter are applicable to a variety of recommender problems such as item recommendation, rating prediction, cold start recommendation and context-aware recommenders.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robert Bell is retired.

  2. 2.

    This article includes copyrighted materials, which were reproduced with permission of ACM and IEEE. The original articles are:

    R. Bell and Y. Koren [3], Ⓒ 2007 IEEE. Reprinted by permission.

    Y. Koren [26], Ⓒ 2008 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1401890.1401944

    Y. Koren [27], Ⓒ 2009 ACM, Inc. Reprinted by permission. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557019.1557072

  3. 3.

    Recall that the dot product between two vectors \(\mathbf {x},\mathbf {y} \in \mathbb {R}^f\) is defined as: \({\mathbf {x}}^T\mathbf {y} = \langle \mathbf {x}, \mathbf {y}\rangle = \sum _{k=1}^f x_k \cdot y_k\).

  4. 4.

    The item i should be excluded from the summation over R(u). To simplify notation, we omit this detail in the remainder of this section.

  5. 5.

    Notational clarification: With other neighborhood models it was beneficial to use Sk(i; u), which denotes the k items most similar to i among those rated by u. Hence, if u rated at least k items, we will always have |Sk(i; u)| = k, regardless of how similar those items are to i. However, |Rk(i; u)| is typically smaller than k, as some of those items most similar to i were not rated by u.

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Correspondence to Yehuda Koren .

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Koren, Y., Rendle, S., Bell, R. (2022). Advances in Collaborative Filtering. In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B. (eds) Recommender Systems Handbook. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-2197-4_3

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