Personal vs.

Social Recommender Systems Used in Entertainment Websites

Pearl Pu

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology EPFL

Switzerland March 2007

Talk Outline




Part I: Social Recommender Systems Part II: Personal Recommender Systems Part III: Comparison of Pandora vs. Last.fm Part IV: Outstanding Issues in this domain

Recommender Systems
definition

Recommender Systems (RS) propose items that may interest users
Books, movies, music, news, trips, etc.

Why are RS becoming popular

Information overload on the web
The web is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery

Novelty and surprise

Social Recommenders
collaborative filtering
Propose items based on

Ratings
Ratings of other similar users
Pearson correlation method, etc.

Match you with your group Rating based

Which DVD to watch Tonight?

User Similarity
Pearson correlation

wa ,u =

m

( r  r )( r  r ) , , a i a u i u i =1
2

( ) r  r , a i a i =1

( ) r  r , u i u i =1

User x and user y based on items co-rated by x and y

Rating Generation
aggregating function

User-to-user vs. item-to-item

Users >> items

More users or more items?
Correlate two users based on their rating vectors of items

Using cosine for item-to-item

The S matrix

Clustering Algorithms

Classified into at least six categories






fuzzy clustering, nearest-neighbor clustering, hierarchical clustering, artificial neural networks for clustering, statistical clustering algorithms, and density-based clustering.
Lin & Chen, 2005:& Chen, M.-S. (2005). Combining partitioning and hierarchical algorithms for robust and efficient data clustering with cohesion self-merging. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 17(2), 145159.

Limitations with Social Recommenders

Sparcity: item >> rated items new user problem New item problem - cold start Scalability - matrix Their tastes may be hard to predict - existing vs. current preferences
Shilling attacks

Talk Outline




Part I: Social Recommender Systems Part II: Personal Recommender Systems Part III: Comparison of Pandora vs. Last.fm Part IV: Outstanding Issues in this domain

Do people have similar taste?

Markets of infinite choice




The carousel puzzle Amazon: 98 percent of its top 100,000 books 95 percent of its 25,000 DVDs Apple: every one of the 1 million tracks in iTunes was sold at least once.

the long tail

Hits are great, but niches are emerging

Recommenders based on Preferences

Conversational RS




Users state preferences RS proposes a set of items Users critique the items RS refines the result set

Preference based Search

A definition
Given a collection O = f o1 . on of n options,
preference-based search (PBS) is an interactive process
that helps users identify the most preferred option, called the target option ot,
based on a set of preferences that they have stated on the attributes of the target.

Content Encoding

Content profile: each item in a database is characterized by a set of attributes
Similitude matching
Products can be encoded with physical features
What about art work?

Knowledge intensive task

Limitations of PBS

Preference models
Users do not state preferences accurately
Incomplete, erroneous
Available options do not match models
What about discovery?

Consider diversity
Consider proposing attractive items to stimulate preference expression

Accuracy is a main challenge

Talk Outline




Part I: Social Recommender Systems Part II: Personal Recommender Systems Part III: Comparison of Pandora vs. Last.fm Part IV: Outstanding Issues in this domain

Comparison of Personal vs. Social RS

two entertainment WS


Hard to encode products into feature vectors Users cannot state preferences accurately

No need to encode products (rating based) Easy to rate items (experience based) Initial effort is required No feedback mechanism

Little initial effort Possible to give refined feedback

Which one is able to overcome user adoption problem

Pandora vs. Last.fm

Pandora

Hundreds of musicians to encode each song into a vector
Hundred features: such as harmony, instrumentation or rhythm
10000 artists and has created more than 13 million stations.

Last.fm

Personalized radio stations
Recommendation based on a collection of music profiles
The time-to-recommendation is long

Experiment




Within subject study 64 participants (12 females) 62% from 18-24, 34% from 25-30, 4% above User tasks




Setup Listen to recommended music for an hour Answer assessment questions A week later, evaluate the other system

Result Analysis
product search

Result Analysis
product search

Result Analysis
product search

Result Analysis
product search

P < 0.0049

Result Analysis
product search

Result Analy sis

product search

Pandora: top 8 entertainment WS

Time Magazine 2006





Prefer Pandora than Last.fm Use Pandora again Prefer Pandoras interface Perceive it inspire confidence Suggested Songs are more enjoyable and novel, and better than friends suggestions.

Talk Outline




Part I: Social Recommender Systems Part II: Personal Recommender Systems Part III: Comparison of Pandora vs. Last.fm Part IV: Outstanding Issues in this domain

Part IV: Outstanding Issues

Accuracy
Acceptance
Contribution

User acceptance
If TiVo Thinks You Are Gay, heres How to Set it Straight

Accuracy is not enough
Subjective attitudes

Accuracy Transparency Involvement

Control Explanation interfaces

Confidence

Intention to purchase Intention to return

Acceptance

effort Ease of use Interaction design

Save effort

Who contributes to the social web?

MovieLens: 100,000 registered users, 2% ever posted one or more messages.
Wikipedia: 524 people did 50% of all the edits (.7%)
Gnutella 10% of users provide 87% of all he music
Open-source: 4% of developers contribute 88% of new code and 66% of code fixes (Mockus, Fielding & Andersen, 2002)

Most users are social loafers

Design for Contribution

Your rating will improve our predictions for ComedyFans!
Be the first to review this book
You will be paid for reviewing this hotel

Self interest, parochialism, monetary incentive

Recommendation as a Process

We Will Validate

Recommendation as a Process

Henry Lieberman, MIT
Going to a party
Want to be sophisticated tonight

Affective Recommendation

Emotional cues: happy, sad, excited,
How users may accept recommendations as a function of their emotions

Take Home Messages

Social vs. Personal Recommender Systems
Comparison of Pandora and Last.fm

Design guidelines for user adoption - low effort, ease of use, good accuracy, involvement, enjoyability, novelty.

Open Issues: acceptance, contribution, context-aware recommendation, staying power