Synopsis of

RECOMMENDATION SYSTEMS

Submitted by:
Mr Ajay Kumar
06916403210
B.Tech

Department of Computer Science Engineering

University School of Information and Technology
Oct, 2013

1. Introduction
Recommender systems or Recommendation systems (sometimes replacing
"system" with a synonym such as platform or engine) are a subclass of information
filtering system that seek to predict the 'rating' or 'preference' that user would give to
an item (such as music, books, or movies) or social element (e.g. people or groups)
they had not yet considered, using a model built from the characteristics of an item
(content-based approaches) or the user's social environment (collaborative filtering
approaches).[1]
Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years. A few
examples of such systems:
When viewing an Application in PLAY STORE, the store will recommend additional
items based on a matrix of what other shoppers bought along with the currently
selected item.
b) Oering news articles to on-line newspaper readers, based on a prediction of reader
interests.
a)

c)

When viewing a product on Flipkart.com or Amazon.com, the store will recommend

additional items based on a matrix of what other shoppers bought along with the
currently selected item and also on the basis of what items had the user seen.

d)

Netflix offers predictions of movies that a user might like to watch based on the user's
previous ratings and watching habits (as compared to the behavior of other users),
also taking into account the characteristics (such as the genre) of the film.

e)

In Twitter.com, the user gets to see the feeds related to his interests on his timeline.
The encircled part (in red) is the
feed, which the user gets based
on his/her interests.
Fig. 1 Twitter showing
recommendation using

2. Motivation
Recommendation systems are
very useful for the users, the
users get to know about various
other products, feeds, news,
movies (depending upon, what
type of Recommender System is
been used).

3. Objectives
The need of Recommendation Systems
Solution to large amount of data
Reduce cognitive load on users
Scalability
2|Page

Cold Start

Recommendation Algorithms

Collaborative filtering
Item based collaborative filtering
User-based collaborative filtering
Data collection methods
Explicit feedback
Implicit feedback

4. Description of the research work

4.1 Definition and Classification
A Recommender System provides information or items that are likely to be interest to
a user, in an automated fashion. There is an extensive class of Web applications that
involve predicting user responses to options. Such a facility is called a
recommendation system.
Recommendation systems use a number of dierent technologies. People provide
inputs to the system, Recommendation/ratings of products, etc. System aggregates
those inputs and makes suggestions to persons based on information collected from
other people/sources.

Fig. 2 Categorising Recommendation System

We can classify these systems into two broad groups.
Content-based systems:
Examine properties of the items recommended.
Collaborative ltering systems:
Recommend items based on similarity measures between users and/or items.
The items recommended to a user are those preferred by similar users.
3|Page

However, these technologies by themselves are not sucient, and there are some new
algorithms that have proven eective for recommendation systems.
4.2

Content-based recommender systems

Content-based recommender systems work with proles of users that are created at
the beginning. A prole has information about a user and his taste. Taste is based on
how the user rated items. Generally, when creating a prole, recommender systems
make a survey, to get initial information about a user in order to avoid the new-user
problem. [2]
In the recommendation process, the engine compares the items that were already
positively rated by the user with the items he didnt rate and looks for similarities.
Those items that are mostly similar to the positively rated ones, will be recommended
to the user.

Fig. 3 Content-based recommender systems [3]

4.3

Collaborative ltering systems

Collaborative ltering became one of the most researched techniques of recommender
systems since this approach was mentioned and described by Paul Resnick and Hal
Varian in 1997. The idea of collaborative ltering is in nding users in a community
that share appreciations [4]. If two users have same or almost same rated items in
common, then they have similar tastes. Such users build a group or a so called
neighbourhood. A user gets recommendations to those items that he/she hasnt rated
before, but that were already positively rated by users in his/her neighbourhood.

4|Page

Fig. 4 Collaborative ltering systems [5]

4.4

CHALLENGES AND ISSUES

New Users
Its difcult to give recommendations to new users as his prole is almost empty and
he hasnt rated any items yet so his taste is unknown to the system. This is also called
the coldstart problem. In some recommender systems this problem is solved with
survey when creating a prole. Items can also have a cold-start when they are new in
the system and havent been rated before. Both of these problems can be also solved
with hybrid approaches.
Scalability
With the growth of numbers of users and items, the system needs more resources for
processing information and forming recommendations. Majority of resources is
consumed with the purpose of determining users with similar tastes, and goods with
similar descriptions. This problem is also solved by the combination of various types
of lters and physical improvement of systems. Parts of numerous computations may
also be implemented ofine in order to accelerate issuance of recommendations
online.
Large Amount of data
When we are dealing with a large amount of data, we need filters to sort out the data
with respect to the user search. For e.g. Flipkart, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, dont
spread their whole data in one go. The Statistics of the data searched by the user is
5|Page

collected and based on those statistics, the required data is hosted or shown in the
feeds of the website.
Lack of Data
Perhaps the biggest issue facing recommender systems is that they need a lot of data
to effectively make recommendations.
Changing User Preferences
Whenever the user goes on flipkart.com, the user searches for a particular item. For
e.g., one day he searches books, and if next day, he is searching for headphones, but
now again (based on his previous search), he will get some recommendations related
to books.

5. Conclusion
Recommendation systems have denitely opened new options of searching and
ltering information. Internet stores have accelerated prots, music lovers have
discovered new artists unknown to them before, and tourists might take a look to new
interesting places. Having all these options available, the customers save their time in
multiple numbers. And this is the minor part of the benecial inuence of
recommendation system on the clients. At the same time, there are some
shortcomings, limits, and defects. Some of them were discussed above.
Recommendation systems are not limited by only computers and mobile devices, but
they can also open new security capabilities while embedded into automobile
industry, and overall, into devices of everyday use. This, in turn, would require
development of more specied recommendation systems. All these facts make us sure
that these systems will be promising and topical for long time. And we are just in the
initial stage of their development.

References
1. Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha Shapira, Introduction to Recommender
Systems Handbook, Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35
2. L. Candillier, F. Meyer, F. Fessant, and K. Jack, State-of-the-art recommender
systems, 2009.
3. http://nlp.postech.ac.kr/research/previous_research/ocr/images/ocr_01.gif
4. G. Adomavicius and A. Tuzhilin, Toward the next generation of recommender
systems: A survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions, IEEE Trans. on
Knowl and Data Eng., vol. 17, pp. 734749, June 2005. [Online]. Available:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2005.99
5. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/archive/5/52/20130124173056%21C
ollaborative_filtering.gif

6|Page