Collaborative Recommendation with Multi-Criteria Ratings

Abstract

Recommendation systems utilize data analysis techniques to the problem of helping users find the items they would like. Example applications include the recommendation systems for movies, books, CDs and many others. As recommendation systems emerge as an independent research area, the rating structure plays a critical role in recent studies. Among many alternatives, the collaborative filtering algorithms are gen-erally accepted to be successful to estimate user ratings of unseen items and then to derive proper recommen-dations. In this paper, we extend the concept of single criterion ratings to multi-criteria ones, i.e., an item can be evaluated in many different aspects. For example, the goodness of a restaurant can be evaluated in terms of its food, decor, service and cost. Since there are usually conflicts among different criteria, the recommen-dation problem cannot be formulated as an optimization problem any more. Instead, we propose in this paper to use data query techniques to solve this multi-criteria recommendation problem. Empirical studies show that our approach is of both theoretical and practical values.