Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

4-2014

Abstract

Personalization, or customizing the experience of each individual user, is seen as a useful way to navigate the huge variety of choices on the Web today. A key tenet of personalization is the capacity to model user preferences. The paradigm has shifted from that of individual preferences, whereby we look at a user's past activities alone, to that of shared preferences, whereby we model the similarities in preferences between pairs of users (e.g., friends, people with similar interests). However, shared preferences are still too granular, because it assumes that a pair of users would share preferences across all items. We therefore postulate the need to pay attention to "context", which refers to the specific item on which the preferences between two users are to be estimated. In this paper, we propose a generative model for contextual agreement in preferences. For every triplet consisting of two users and an item, the model estimates both the prior probability of agreement between the two users, as well as the posterior probability of agreement with respect to the item at hand. The model parameters are estimated from ratings data. To extend the model to unseen ratings, we further propose several matrix factorization techniques focused on predicting agreement, rather than ratings. Experiments on real-life data show that our model yields context-specific similarity values that perform better on a prediction task than models relying on shared preferences.

Discipline

Databases and Information Systems | Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing

Publication

WWW '14: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web: April 7-11, 2014, Seoul, Korea

First Page

315

Last Page

326

ISBN

9781450327442

Identifier

10.1145/2566486.2568006

Publisher

ACM

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

LARC

Additional URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2566486.2568006

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