Incorporating User Control into Recommender Systems
Based on Naive Bayesian Classification
Verus Pronk
Philips Research Europe
High Tech Campus 34
5656 AE Eindhoven
The Netherlands
verus.pronk@philips.com wim.verhaegh@philips.com
Adolf Proidl Marco Tiemann
Philips Research Europe
Gutheil-Schoder-Gasse 10
A-1100 Vienna
Austria
adolf.proidl@philips.com
ABSTRACT
Recommender systems are increasingly being employed to person-
alize services, such as on the web, but also in electronics devices,
such as personal video recorders. These recommenders learn a user
profile, based on rating feedback from the user on, e.g., books,
songs, or TV programs, and use machine learning techniques to
infer the ratings of new items.
The techniques commonly used are collaborative filtering and
naive Bayesian classification, and they are known to have several
problems, in particular the cold-start problem and its slow adaptiv-
ity to changing user preferences. These problems can be mitigated
by allowing the user to set up or manipulate his profile.
In this paper, we propose an extension to the naive Bayesian clas-
sifier that enhances user control. We do this by maintaining and
flexibly integrating two profiles for a user, one learned by rating
feedback, and one created by the user. We in particular show how
the cold-start problem is mitigated.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
G.3 [Probability and Statistics]: Probabilistic algorithms (includ-
ing Monte Carlo); H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: In-
formation filtering
General Terms
Algorithms
Keywords
classification, machine learning, naive Bayes, recommender, user
profile, user control, multi-valued features
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RecSys'07, October 19–20, 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
Copyright 2007 ACM 978-1-59593-730-8/07/0010 ...$5.00.
73
Wim Verhaegh
Philips Research Europe
High Tech Campus 11
5656 AE Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Philips Research Europe
High Tech Campus 34
5656 AE Eindhoven
The Netherlands
marco.tiemann@philips.com
1. INTRODUCTION
The use of recommender technology is steadily being introduced
into the market. Web sites such as Yahoo! Movies and MovieLens
offer a recommender to aid users in finding the movies they like,
and personal video recorders like the Tivo box use a recommender
for automatic recording of the user’s favorite movies.
A recommender learns the taste of a user, based on ratings that
the user supplies on items, such as movies. These ratings are typi-
cally a positive−negative classification, indicating like and dislike,
respectively, or a more elaborate classification into a range of like-
degrees. As such, this is the interface by which the user teaches the
recommender about his taste. This learning process is inherently
slow in the sense that the user has to rate a considerable number of
items before the recommender can make sensible suggestions. This
leads to the well-known cold-start problem and to a slow adaptabil-
ity of the recommender to changing user preferences. The former
problem pertains to the situation that the user has only rated a few
items.
Although the cold-start problem can be mitigated by setting up a
rating session wherein the user rates a sufficient number of items,
the burden this places upon the user is generally considered unac-
ceptable. Furthermore, this is not an elegant way to deal with a
sudden change of interest. For example, if the user discovers that
he likes a particular actor or director, having to rate many movies
before the recommender has learned this clearly indicates that this
rating interface is inappropriate to deal with such situations. The
user should have more direct control over the recommender to be
able to resolve these situations.
Naive Bayesian classification (NBC) lends itself well to this type
of user control because often, the profile it uses is quite intuitive.
A movie is described by a number of feature-value pairs, such as
(channel, Hallmark Movie Channel), (actor, Clint Eastwood), or
(start time, 20:00), and the profile consists of positive and negative
counts for individual feature-value pairs. From these figures, like-
degrees can be computed, at the level of feature-value pairs rather
than at the level of individual movies. The user can similarly create
a profile by defining like-degrees for feature-value pairs, so that
these profiles can be combined.
We propose to extend NBC by incorporating a user-defined pro-
file and flexibly combining it with the learned profile. This flexibil-
ity is such that, initially, the recommender operates based solely on
the user-defined profile and, as the recommender learns, the learned
profile gradually replaces the user-defined profile. However, when
the user adapts his profile, the adapted part temporarily takes over
again.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. After briefly
describing related work in Section 2, we revisit naive Bayesian
classification in Section 3. Then, in Section 4, we explain how
to incorporate a user-defined profile into the classifier. In Section 5
we generalize this to multi-valued features, where a feature can at-
tain a number of values simultaneously. We report on performance
results, providing a proof of concept for the recommender, in Sec-
tion 6. We make some concluding remarks in Section 7.
2. RELATED WORK
Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to miti-
gate the cold-start problem. In [6], the authors propose to use pre-
computed stereotypes from which a user can choose some to jump-
start a recommender. A stereotype is a possibly large set of items,
TV programs in their paper, that are similar to each other, where
similarity is defined using the modified value-difference metric (see
[2], [10]). The precomputation uses rating histories of a number of
users and uses a standard clustering algorithm.
An alternative approach is to combine a user-defined recom-
mender with a learning recommender by combining their outputs.
These are called hybrid recommender systems. in [12], the authors
propose to use a neural network for fusing the outputs. User con-
trol beyond incorporating a user-defined recommender is, however,
lacking.
In [9], the author suggests an alternative to MovieLens, called
DynamicLens, to aid the user in providing a recommender system
with user-defined ratings to a meta-recommender system. The in-
terface is in particular geared towards enhancing user control in
hybrid recommender systems.
The aim of this paper is to integrate a user-defined profile and a
learned profile into a single recommender, rather than using multi-
ple recommenders, offering direct user control over recommended
items.
3. NAIVE BAYESIAN CLASSIFICATION
We next describe NBC in detail, starting with some notation.
An instance x is described by f feature values xi ∈ Di , for each
i = 1, 2, . . . , f , where Di is the domain of feature i. Its class is
denoted by c(x) ∈ C , where C is the set of classes. For the moment,
we do not consider missing features, but return to this shortly.
Given is a non-empty set X of training instances and for each
instance x ∈ X its class cx = c(x). Let y be an instance to be clas-
sified. The approach in NBC is that we express Pr(c(y) = j), for
each j ∈ C , in terms of the training data.
Let x be a random variable on the domain U of instances. Us-
ing Bayes’ rule and assuming conditional independence of feature
values for a given class, we can rephrase Pr(c(y) = j) as follows.
Pr(c(y) = j) = Pr(c(x) = j | x = y)
Pr(c(x) = j) Pr(x = y | c(x) = j)
= bilities are relatively small, to obtain sufficiently reliable estimates
Pr(x = y)
f keep the values of N( j) approximately equal. In this case, however,
Pr(c(x) = j) ∏i=1 Pr(xi = yi | c(x) = j)
= . (1)
Pr(x = y)
As the denominator can alternatively be written as the sum over all
j of the numerator, it serves as a normalization constant. When
comparing probabilities, this constant can be omitted.
74
The factors Pr(c(x) = j) are called prior probabilities, the factors
Pr(xi = yi | c(x) = j) conditional probabilities, and the expressions
Pr(c(y) = j) are called the posterior probabilities.
The general approach in NBC is that the prior and conditional
probabilities are estimated using the training data to obtain esti-
mates of the posterior probabilities. We define the learned profile
as follows. For each feature i, each value v ∈ Di , and each class j,
N( j) = |{x ∈ X | cx = j}| and
N(i, v, j) = |{x ∈ X | xi = v ∧ cx = j}| , (2)
where |S| denotes the cardinality of a set S. By assuming, with-
out loss of generality, that for each j, N( j) > 0, we estimate the
probabilities as
Pr(c(x) = j) ≈ N( j)/|X | and (3)
N(i, yi , j)
Pr(xi = yi | c(x) = j) ≈ . (4)
N( j)
By substituting these estimates into Equation 1 we obtain an es-
timate of the probability that y belongs to class j in terms of the
training data.
In case N(i, yi , j) = 0 in Equation 4, a technique called Laplace
correction, see [1], is used to prevent the conditional probability
estimate and corresponding posterior probability estimate to be-
come 0. For now, we will assume that we do not have any so-called
zero counts.
The naive Bayes’ classification c̃(y) of y is defined as the value
of j that maximizes the estimate. Ties are broken arbitrarily. For-
mally, c̃(y) is defined as
f
N( j) N(i, yi , j)
c̃(y) = arg max
|X | ∏ . (5)
j∈C i=1 N( j)
If c̃(y) 6= c(y), then we speak of a classification error. The classifi-
cation error rate E, or error rate for short, is defined as
E = Pr(c̃(x) 6= c(x)), (6)
and is a measure for the performance of the classifier. Here, x is
again a randomly chosen instance. The classification accuracy is
defined as 1 − E. The definition of error rate can be refined by
considering class-conditional error rates. Given a class j, we define
E j = Pr(c̃(x) 6= c(x) | c(x) = j) (7)
as the class- j error rate. The class-conditional classification accu-
racy is given by 1 − E j .
This summarizes the classical approach towards naive Bayesian
classification, see also [7]. Some remarks, however, are worth mak-
ing. First, Equations 3 and 4 can indeed be used as estimates of the
prior and conditional probabilities, respectively, if the training set
consists of instances chosen randomly on the instance space U . In
practice, this may not be the case. For example, if the prior prob-
abilities are heavily skewed, then this would require a relatively
large training set to obtain a sufficient number of class- j instances
in the training set, for those values of j for which the prior proba-
for the conditional probabilities. It seems therefore reasonable to
Equation 3 does not generally hold, and proper values for the prior
probabilities should be obtained in a different way. Also in other
cases, such as in a recommender system, where it may be largely
up to the user which instances end up in the training set, Equation 3
may be invalid.
 For a two-class recommender, [5] suggests to set the prior prob- ranges from 0 to 1, 1 itself excluded. This l(i, v) can be interpreted
abilities so as to balance the class-conditional error rates, an ap- as a like-degree for feature-value pair (i, v), where 0.5 corresponds
proach that is essentially the same a suggested in [4], where the to neutral, as it leads to the neutral skewing factor of 1. Further-
author uses a cost-based approach towards classification. We adopt more, two non-zero like-degrees l and 1 − l lead to the skewing
the same approach, in that the priors are set to predefined values factors of l/(1 − l) and (1 − l)/l, respectively, which cancel each
p j for each j ∈ C , based on criteria related to the class-conditional other when multiplied together.
error rates. This forms the basis for the incorporation of a user-defined pro-
The second remark pertains to missing features and features with file l u . On the one hand, the like-degree l l (i, v) is learned from the
multiple values. We will return to the latter in Section 5. When- training set using the learned skewing factor r l (i, v), defined as
ever a feature is missing in an instance to be classified, we omit the
N(i, v, +)/N(i, +)
corresponding factor from Equation 5. To deal with missing fea- rl (i, v) = , (14)
tures in instances from the training set, we adapt the estimate of the N(i, v, −)/N(i, −)
conditional probability, given in Equation 4 to which estimates the skewing factor given by Equation 10. On the
N(i, yi , j) other hand, for each feature-value pair (i, v), there is a user-defined
Pr(xi = yi | c(x) = j) ≈ , like-degree l u (i, v). Its default value is 0.5, i.e. neutral, but the user
N(i, j)
can set this like-degree to any value in the range [0, 1). Using this
where N(i, j) = ∑v∈Di N(i, v, j). Thus, N(i, j) counts for each j default value enables the user to easily create a profile by only set-
the number of instances in the training set that do have a value for ting a few like-degrees.
feature i. The user-defined and learned like-degrees are integrated as fol-
The definition of c̃ in Equation 5 is thus replaced by lows. We define the integrated like-degree l int (i, v) as
f
N(i, yi , j) l int (i, v) = αl u (i, v) + (1 − α)l l (i, v), (15)
c̃(y) = arg max p j ∏ . (8)
j∈C i=1 N(i, j) with α ∈ [0, 1]. This l int (i, v)
is next used to calculate its corre-
sponding integrated skewing factor r int (i, v) using the inverse func-
4. INCORPORATING A USER-DEFINED tion x/(1 − x) of x/(1 + x), which is used in Equation 13. This
PROFILE skewing factor replaces r(i, v) in Equation 12.
To generate a recommender that starts off as one based on a user-
The goal in this section is to integrate a user-defined profile with
defined profile and gradually turns into a learning recommender
the learned profile, given by Equation 2. We do this by defining
based only on the learned profile, this α should preferably be made
like-degrees for individual feature values.
dependent on the size of the training set. The thick, solid line in
We assume that there are two classes, i.e., positive (+) and neg-
Figure 1 illustrates a possible definition, where the horizontal axis
ative (−). We also simplify notation by omitting, where possible,
denotes the training set size.
explicit reference to the random variable x. In particular, we ab-
breviate ‘c(x) = j’ to ‘ j’ and ‘x = y’ to ‘y’. Using Equation 1 and
predefined prior probabilities p+ and p− , we derive that
1
Pr(+ | y) f
p+ Pr(xi = yi | +)
Pr(− | y)
= ∏ Pr(xi = yi | −) .
p− i=1
(9) α
Corresponding to the definition of c̃ in Equation 8, if the estimate
of the right-hand side of this equation is larger than 1, y is classified
as positive, if it is smaller than 1, y is classified as negative, and if 0
it equals one, a random choice is made. 0 K S0 L
We next define
S
Pr(xi = v | +) Figure 1: Possible dependency of α on the training set size S
r(i, v) = (10) (thick, solid line) and a possible trajectory of α when an update
Pr(xi = v | −)
at S0 in the user-defined profile and two pruning actions are
Pr(+ | xi = v)/ Pr(− | xi = v)
= (11) performed (thin, grey lines).
Pr(+)/ Pr(−)
as the skewing factor for feature-value pair (i, v). As shown by Initially, that is, until the training set size has a specific size K,
Equation 11, it indicates the relative skew that v causes for feature the user-defined profile should be active only to allow the learned
i in the prior probabilities. Using Equation 10, Equation 9 can be profile to mature somewhat. Otherwise, the user-defined profile
rephrased as would immediately be contaminated with unreliable data. Then,
the learned profile gradually takes over as the training set size in-
Pr(+ | y) p+ f
Pr(− | y)
= ∏ r(i, yi ).
p− i=1
(12) creases, until it is sufficiently large, indicated by the limit L, at
which point the learned profile has completely taken over. There
The involved skewing factors are thus multiplied together. Note is, of course, ample freedom in choosing how α depends on S. The
that a non-zero skewing factor r is canceled by its inverse 1/r. linear relationship is chosen here for simplicity.
Where r(i, v) ranges from 0 to ∞, the derived quantity l(i, v), This can be refined by making α dependent on i, the feature un-
defined as der consideration in Equation 15. In particular, Nmin (i), defined
as
r(i, v)
l(i, v) = , (13) Nmin (i) = min(N(i, −), N(i, +)), (16)
1 + r(i, v)

75
provides a measure for the size of the training data pertaining to Let y be an instance with probabilistic feature values, i.e., for
feature i. Using this feature-dependent measure is especially rel- each i = 1, 2, . . . , f , yi is randomly distributed on Di according to
evant for features that are often not assigned a value, resulting in probability distribution py (i, v). Let Vy (i) ⊆ Di denote the set of
relatively unreliable estimates of the conditional probabilities. possible values of yi . In the case that |Vy (i)| = 1, yi degenerates to
Hence, we propose to define αi as follows. a deterministic value. Let the set Vy = {v | vi ∈ Vy (i), i = 1, 2, . . . , f }
denote the set of values that y can attain. We assume that for each
(L − Nmin (i))+
 
αi = min 1, , (17) v ∈ Vy
L−K
f
where for an expression E, (E)+ stands for max(0, E). This def- Pr(y = v) = ∏ py (i, vi ).
inition corresponds to the thick, solid line in Figure 1, whereby i=1
S = Nmin (i).
This independence assumption is similar to the usual conditional
independence assumption.
4.1 On the user regaining control We are again interested in Pr(c(y) = j) for each class j. Let x be
As the training set size increases, the role of the user-defined a random instance, uniformly distributed on the instance space. We
profile generally decreases. Hence, if the user updates his profile, proceed along the same lines as in Section 3 and partially follow
say the like-degree of feature-value pair (i, v), while the learned Störr. Note that we use short-hand notation, i.e., we abbreviate
profile has nearly or completely taken over, then this does not resort ‘c(x) = j’ to ‘ j’, ‘x = v’ to ‘v’, and ‘x = y’ to ‘y’ in the probability
in much effect, if any. function.
A possible solution to this problem is to prune the rating history
such that Nmin (i) decreases, but this is a rather drastic approach.
It is instead more elegant to incorporate an offset D(i, v) by which Pr(c(y) = j)
Nmin (i) is decreased. Instead of using αi , we use αiv , defined as
= ∑ Pr(c(y) = j | y = v) Pr(y = v)
(L − (Nmin (i) − D(i, v)))+
 
v∈Vy
αiv = min 1, .
L−K = ∑ Pr(c(v) = j) Pr(y = v)
v∈Vy
Now, when the user updates the like-degree of feature-value pair
(i, v), the corresponding offset is set to, e.g., Nmin (i) or Nmin (i) − K, = ∑ Pr( j | v) Pr(y = v)
so that, for this pair, the recommender starts off using only the user- v∈Vy
defined profile again. Once αiv has become 0 again, D(i, v) can be
Pr(v | j) Pr( j)
reset to 0 as well. See Figure 1 for a possible trajectory of αiv . = ∑ Pr(v)
Pr(y = v)
v∈Vy
4.2 Pruning the rating history f
h i
Pr( j) ∑v∈Vy ∏i=1 Pr(xi = vi | j) py (i, vi )
To retain flexibility in the learned profile to adapt to user prefer-
=
ences that change slowly over time, the rating history should reg- Pr(y)
ularly be pruned, e.g., by disregarding the oldest ratings. This is f
h i
complicated by the presence of non-zero offsets D(i, v). Pr( j) ∏i=1 ∑v∈Vy (i) Pr(xi = v | j) py (i, v)
There are various ways to deal with this, but an obvious and = . (18)
Pr(y)
simple solution is to try and keep αiv constant, until the size of
the training set becomes so small that an increase in αiv is neces- Note that Pr(v) = Pr(y), as x is uniformly distributed on the instance
sary. This results in the following update for D(i, v) when Nmin (i) space.
changes from N to N 0 < N. As before, the right-hand side of Equation 18 can be estimated
using the training data, which may also contain instances with prob-
D(i, v) := (D(i, v) − N + N 0 )+ . abilistic feature values. To this end, we generalize the definition of
The thin, grey lines in Figure 1 illustrates a possible trajectory, in- the user profile N(i, v, j) as follows.
dicated by the arrowheads, of the value of α after an update in the
user-defined profile at S = S0 and two pruning actions.
N(i, v, j) = ∑ px (i, v), (19)
x∈X j

where X j = {x ∈ X | cx = j}, i.e. the set of class- j training instances.

5. MULTI-VALUED FEATURES
It is not uncommon that features may have multiple values, such
as the cast of a movie or a list of genres describing a movie in
general terms. A possible approach is to consider a list of values
as independent and to incorporate them as such in the computation
of the posterior probabilities. In particular, if a feature i has a set
of values V , then all feature-value pairs (i, v), with v ∈ V serve
as separate features, each contributing a factor in the product in
Equation 8. Especially when the values in V are dependent, such
as with a fixed cast, this approach results in an over-representation
of this feature.
We provide an alternative to this approach, based on [11], where
the author considers probabilistic feature values: The value of a
feature i is given by a probability distribution on its domain Di .
For an instance y, the classification c̃(y) is generalized to
 
f
N(i, v, j)
c̃(y) = arg max p j ∏  ∑ py (i, v) .
j∈C i=1 v∈V (i) N(i, j) y
Multi-valued features are modeled as uniformly distributed prob-
abilistic features, i.e., for each i, all values v ∈ Vy (i) are equally
probable, i.e., py (i, v) = 1/ | Vy (i) |. In this case, all parameters
py (i, v) can be omitted from the formula above, as is easily veri-
fied. Equation 19 can in this case be interpreted as if each instance
with a multi-valued feature i, say with m values, is subdivided into
m sub-instances, one corresponding to each value, each of which is
counted 1/m times.

76
 learning part user-defined part learning part user-defined part
Shi
conditional probability user-defined conditional probability user-defined
estimates like degree estimates like degrees
Sud Str Ste

learned user-defined
skewing factors skewing factors
S
weighted average ordinary average
Figure 3: Subdivision of part of the rating history of a user into
learned learned user-defined a user-defined-profile, training, and test part.
skewing factor skewing factor skewing factor

learned learned user-defined

like degree like degree like degree

α α’
6. PERFORMANCE RESULTS
integrated integrated This section consists of three parts. We describe the simulation
like degree like degree setup in the first part. In the second, we report on initial results
while experimenting with an actual implementation, resulting in a
integrated integrated
skewing factor skewing factor number of improvements. In the third part, we provide a proof of
(a) (b) concept by using a specially prepared user-defined profile.

Figure 2: Graphical views of the integration steps: (a) without
and (b) with multi-valued features.
Now that we have generalized naive Bayesian classification to
deal with multi-valued features, we next explain how to incorporate
a user-defined profile. Analogously to Equation 9, we derive, based
on Equation 18,
Pr(+ | y) p+ f ∑v∈Vy (i) Pr(xi = v | +)
Pr(− | y)
= ∏ ∑v∈V (i) Pr(xi = v | −) .
p− i=1
y mender. A user may initially set and tune a simple profile, based
Using Equation 10, we can rephrase this as
Pr(+ | y) p+ f ∑v∈Vy (i) Pr(xi = v | −) r(i, v)
Pr(− | y)
= ∏ ∑v∈V (i) Pr(xi = v | −) ,
p− i=1
(20)
y
from which it is easily seen that, for each feature i, a weighted
average of the involved skewing factors is calculated, the weights
depending on the conditional probabilities of the involved values v.
As these weights are not available in the user-defined profile, we
suggest replacing the weights by 1/ | Vy (i) | to calculate the ordi-
nary average.
Both average skewing factors must next be translated to like-
degrees to take a convex combination of these like-degrees. The
final issue to resolve now is how to take a convex combination like
in Equation 15, where the like-degrees have been replaced by the
translation of an average of skewing factors. An obvious solution
is to use the maximum of αiv over v ∈ Vy (i), as this results in a con-
tribution from the user-defined profile corresponding to a value for
which the contribution is maximal. In this way, whenever the like-
degree for a value is updated by the user, its role will maximally
permeate the results. The procedure is illustrated in Figure 2b. For
the learning part of the recommender, we estimate the weighted
average of the learned skewing factors in Equation 20 using the
training data, resulting in a single learned skewing factor, which
is translated to a learned like-degree. For the user-defined part,
we take the ordinary average of the involved user-defined skewing
factors, based on the user-defined like-degrees, resulting in a user-
defined skewing factor, which is translated back to a user-defined
like-degree. Then, these two like-degrees are combined as in Equa-
tion 15, but with an alternative value α0 for α as explained above,
and translated back to an integrated skewing factor.
6.1 Simulation setup
For a thorough assessment of the performance of the recom-
mender, it is necessary to integrate the recommender into an ap-
plication or system, such as a personal video recorder, to involve
users, and to define appropriate performance measures. In particu-
lar, when the recommender is used to guide the automatic recording
of broadcast movies on a hard disk, the total average value to the
user of the content on disk would be an appropriate measure. An-
other issue that is of relevance especially in the current context is
user satisfaction pertaining to the possibility to control the recom-
on immediate feedback in terms of recommended items. We cur-
rently circumvent these complex assessments and instead focus on
a proof of concept, wherein we will show that, given an appro-
priately chosen user-defined profile, the proposed solution indeed
mitigates the cold-start problem. For reasons of space, we will not
investigate sudden changes of interest by users, so that the offsets
D(i, v) do not play a role and the αi , defined in Equation 17 can be
used, which is independent of the feature values.
We consider the rating histories of seven users A, . . . , G that we
collected. For each user, we use part of his rating history to create
an appropriate user-defined profile. How this is done will shortly
be explained. We use another part of the rating history to train the
recommender and to obtain values for the prior probabilities. We
use yet another part to test it. Figure 3 and Table 1 illustrate the
details. The complete rating history of size Shi is shown as a line
that loosely corresponds to a time line. It alternatingly contains
positively and negatively rated programs. On this line are indicated
the data used for the user-defined profile, Sud in size, the training set
of size Str , and the test set of size Ste . The variable S indicates the
starting position of the three adjacent parts and this variable runs
over the rating history to collect sufficient statistics.
Referring to the table, the parameters K and L pertain to the def-
inition of αi in Equation 17. They were chosen, based on some
experience with the recommender. Note that a value of 50 for L
implies that a rating history of at least 100 programs is required for
the recommender to become completely based on the learned pro-
file. The parameter d is used in the construction of the user-defined
profile, and is discussed below. For each value of Str , which runs
from 0 to 100 with a step size of 5, the variable j, which controls
S, runs from 0 to jmax , where jmax is the largest integer satisfying
the inequality ( jmax + 1)Sud + Str + Ste ≤ Shi . This choice causes

77
almost the entire rating history to be used for each value of Str , each
time with an independent, user-defined profile. These jmax + 1 re-
sults are averaged to compute an error rate.
Table 1: Parameter settings for the simulations.
parameter value(s)
K 10
L 50
d 7
Sud 50
Str 0 (5)100
Ste 100
S jSud
The user-defined profile is constructed as follows. Using the
designated history part, skewing factors are defined for all feature-
value pairs, according to Equation 14, using Laplace correction if
necessary. These are next converted to like-degrees and rounded to
the nearest of a limited number of like-degrees lk , k = 1, 2, . . . , d,
defined as
lk = (k − 0.5)/d.
A value of d = 7 for d seems reasonable. Hence, we mimic a
user who has meticulously defined a profile that closely matches
a learned profile based on 50 ratings, but is restrained to only a
limited number of equidistant like-degrees. Although this is not
realistic in practice, it does provide proper input for a proof of con-
cept.
As already mentioned, the training set is also used to generate
values for the prior probabilities. This is done as follows. Using
the leave-one-out cross-validation method, see [7], positive poste-
rior probability estimates are calculated for all training instances,
using uniform priors. Next, a decision threshold in the interval
(0, 1) is determined that results in a minimal difference between
the positive and negative classification error rate on the classified
instances. The decision threshold determines which instances are
classified as positive and which ones as negative, based on a com-
parison with the positive posterior probability estimates. The deci-
sion threshold can be translated to prior probabilities. In particular,
it can be shown that, if uniform priors are used initially, then for
a decision threshold γ, the positive prior probability should set to
1 − γ. Once the priors have been set, the arg-max operator can be
used, effectively resulting in using a decision threshold of 0.5.
6.2 Initial results
In practice, a user will not generally set a large number of like-
degrees, so that the user-defined profile will contain a lot of neutral
values of 0.5, and thus skewing factors equal to 1. These neutral
values have a detrimental effect on the classification accuracy. To
mitigate this, the approach we take is that the ordinary average over
the user-defined skewing factors is taken only over those unequal
to 1. If there are no such skewing factors, the average is set to 1.
This change correspondingly influences the definition of α0 in the
general case that the offsets may be unequal 0. The maximum is
only taken over those values whose user-defined skewing factors
are unequal to 1. If there are no such skewing factors, all α-values
for the multi-valued feature are the same, and this value should be
chosen. For the latter it is required that the offset D(i, v) should be
reset to 0 whenever the user resets the corresponding like-degree to
neutral. This, however, is of no concern for the current simulations.
78
Although it is tempting not to use small training sets to generate
the priors, it has a detrimental effect on the classification accuracy.
Hence, unless there is no training data in either class, in which case
the priors are set to 0.5, the training set is used to generate the
priors.
The sometimes necessary Laplace correction needs the domain
sizes of the features. For some features, this domain is very large,
such as for actors, and in general these are not known. We instead
use as the domain size for feature i the number of feature-value
pairs (i, v) that exist in the training set, with a lower bound of 1 to
prevent domains of size 0.
In the used rating histories, some features are often not present,
leading to relatively small values of Nmin (i), defined in Equation 16
for large training sets. This consequently leads to a slow take-over
by the learning recommender. And besides this, the features that
are often not present generally do not contribute significantly to
the classification accuracy. Hence, all features that were largely
absent in the rating histories were discarded. For simplicity, we
also discarded the feature ‘description’.
6.3 Proof of concept
The performance measure of interest we use is the classification
error rate. Figures 4−10 compare the classification error rates of
the integrated recommender with that of a learning recommender
for each of the users.
For each of the users, the results show that the cold-start prob-
lem has been significantly reduced. Depending on the user, the
integrated recommender has an advantage over the learning recom-
mender for a longer or shorter period of time. For each user, the
curves converge quite fast to a difference of less than 0.05. This
may be explained by the fact that the tastes of the users are obvi-
ously not that difficult to learn.
Apparently, choosing priors, based on a small training set, and
using an ordinary average instead of a weighted average as ex-
plained in Section 5 do not have a devastating effect.
0.5
learning
0.45 integrated
0.4
classification error rate
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0 20 40 60 80 100
training set size
Figure 4: Results for user A.
7. CONCLUDING REMARKS
In this paper, we have proposed to seamlessly integrate a user-
defined and a learned profile into a recommender based on naive
Bayesian classification in order to mitigate the cold-start problem
and to enhance user control.
The results reported upon provide a proof of concept using a
limited amount of ground-truth data. The experiments could be
 0.5 0.5
learning learning
0.45 integrated 0.45 integrated
0.4 0.4
classification error rate

classification error rate

0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0.15 0.15
0.1 0.1
0.05 0.05
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
training set size training set size

Figure 5: Results for user B. Figure 7: Results for user D.

0.5 0.5
learning learning
0.45 integrated 0.45 integrated
0.4 0.4
classification error rate

classification error rate

0.35 0.35
0.3 0.3
0.25 0.25
0.2 0.2
0.15 0.15
0.1 0.1
0.05 0.05
0 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 0 20 40 60 80 100
training set size training set size

Figure 6: Results for user C. Figure 8: Results for user E.

extended with more data, using, for instance, the Duine data set,
see [3]. In addition to these experiments, user tests should be per-
formed to assess the use and usefulness of the proposed solution,
including sudden changes of interest of the user. To test sudden
changes of interest, a possible approach is to combine the rating
histories of two users and append one to the other. Upon the change
from the first to the second rating history, a user-defined profile is
built and incorporated using some data from the second rating his-
tory in a similar way as described in the paper.
The integration of a user-defined profile with a learned profile
also allows the user-defined profile to come from another source, or
even various sources. For example, using the learned profile from
another user can be used to jump-start the learning recommender,
thereby still allowing ample freedom to change this profile.
The proposed solution may be refined by incorporating the re-
sults from Pronk, Gutta, and Verhaegh (2005), who extend the
naive Bayesian classifier by adding confidence levels to the pos-
terior probability estimates. These confidence levels can provide
additional control pertaining to how fast the learned profile could
take over the user-defined profile. This is a topic for further re-
search.
A further refinement is to utilize feature-selection algorithms to
optimize the performance of the recommender by excluding certain
features. An additional issue here is that the user might still want
to exert control on the recommender using one of the excluded fea-
tures. Also this is a topic for further research.
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Figure 10: Results for user G.

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