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Active Learning in Recommender Systems

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Recommender Systems Handbook

Abstract

Recommender Systems (RSs) are often assumed to present items to users for one reason – to recommend items a user will likely be interested in. Of course RSs do recommend, but this assumption is biased, with no help of the title, towards the “recommending” the system will do. There is another reason for presenting an item to the user: to learn more about his/her preferences, or his/her likes and dislikes. This is where Active Learning (AL) comes in. Augmenting RSs with AL helps the user become more self-aware of their own likes/dislikes while at the same time providing new information to the system that it can analyze for subsequent recommendations. In essence, applying AL to RSs allows for personalization of the recommending process, a concept that makes sense as recommending is inherently geared towards personalization. This is accomplished by letting the system actively influence which items the user is exposed to (e.g. the items displayed to the user during sign-up orduring regular use), and letting the user explore his/her interests freely.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our appreciation to Professor Okamoto, Professor Ueno, Professor Tokunaga, Professor Tomioka, Dr. Sheinman, Dr. Vilenius, Sachi Kabasawa and Akane Odake for their help and assistance, and also to MEXT and JST for their financial support; comments received from reviewers and editors were also indespensible to the writing process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Neil Rubens

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Dain Kaplan & Masashi Sugiyama

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  1. Neil Rubens
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  2. Dain Kaplan
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  3. Masashi Sugiyama
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Neil Rubens .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani 3, Bolzano, 39100, Italy

    Francesco Ricci

  2. , Dept. Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, 84105, Israel

    Lior Rokach

  3. Dept. Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Bracha Shapira

  4. School of Communication,, Information & Library Studies, Rutgers University, Huntington Street 4, New Brunswick, 08901-1071, New Jersey, USA

    Paul B. Kantor

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Rubens, N., Kaplan, D., Sugiyama, M. (2011). Active Learning in Recommender Systems. In: Ricci, F., Rokach, L., Shapira, B., Kantor, P. (eds) Recommender Systems Handbook. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85820-3_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-85820-3_23

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