Collaborative Filtering

Customer’s World
• What Book Should I read Next
• Which movie/ web-series to watch
• What food to order
• What dress to buy
You visit an online bookstore

The store has 100,000 books.

On the webpage, they will display 5 book covers, especially for you.

Which ones will they display?

Why?
• webpages, music, films, clothes, food, everything ... this is very
important for e-commerce -- big financial gains if stores get
recommendations ‘right’
Amazon: with minimal info about me via a
cookie on this netbook
Amazon, when I logged in
Basic approaches used for recommendation
• User-based
• Recommend things that were purchased or viewed by users who are similar
to you

• Item-based
• Recommend things that are similar to the items that you have
viewed/purchased before
User Profiles
For user-based recommendation, sites need to have some kind of user
profile.

Similarity with other users is based on distance measurements based

on the profile.

What do you think could be in a user profile?

Potential contents of user profiles
• Demographic data: age, gender, salary, profession, country of
residence, country of origin, religion ...

• Site behaviour: Purchase history at the site; viewing history, perhaps

including time spent on certain pages/items; clickstream sequence
K-Nearest Neighbour based Recommendation

Age

You

Salary
(Think in terms of many dimensions, not just these two)
K-Nearest Neighbour based Recommendation

Age

You

Salary
Your neighbours: recommend things that they have viewed/purchased
Collaborative Filtering: The main idea

People who purchased A

also purchased B

Different from nearest-neighbour; this can lead

to recommendations based on behaviour of
users who are very dissimilar to you
 Other forms/aspects of
collaborative filtering
Why “collaborative”? Basically, someone else (in fact many someones)
have gone to the effort of viewing/filtering things, and chosen the
best few. You get a recommendation of the best few, without having
to spend the effort.
Collaborative Filtering and User Ratings

Many systems ask users to rate items – e.g. on a scale of

1 to 10. These ratings then enable the system to give more
precise/accurate recommendations, and use a variety of
sophisticated learning/prediction algorithms.
Collaborative Filtering and User Ratings

Many systems ask users to rate items – e.g. on a scale of

1 to 10. These ratings then enable the system to give more
precise/accurate recommendations, and use a variety of
sophisticated learning/prediction algorithms.

E.g. Here are user ratings for some items: “?” means unrated.

A B C D E F G H
You: 7 2 1 8 9 9 ? ?
User1 1 8 8 2 ? 2 8 7
User2 6 3 3 7 6 5 3 1
User3 7 2 1 7 7 ? 3 1

How might a system predict your rating for items G and H?

Collaborative Filtering Works
BellCore’s MovieRecommender
(Bell Communications Research)
• Participants sent email to videos@bellcore.com
• System replied with a list of 500 movies to rate on a 1-10 scale (250
random, 250 popular)
• Only subset need to be rated
• New participant P sends in rated movies via email
• System compares ratings for P to ratings of (a random sample of)
previous users
• Most similar users are used to predict scores for unrated movies
• System returns recommendations in an email message.
Display the right adverts on your site
Question
• Shall we recommend Gully Boy to Sunny ?

Estimate of Sunny’s Rating

End