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Identification of Grey Sheep Users by Histogram Intersection in Recommender Systems

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10604))

Abstract

Collaborative filtering, as one of the most popular recommendation algorithms, has been well developed in the area of recommender systems. However, one of the classical challenges in collaborative filtering, the problem of “Grey Sheep” user, is still under investigation. “Grey Sheep” users is a group of the users who may neither agree nor disagree with the majority of the users. They may introduce difficulties to produce accurate collaborative recommendations. In this paper, discuss the drawbacks in the approach that can identify the Grey Sheep users by reusing the outlier detection techniques based on the distribution of user-user similarities. We propose to alleviate these drawbacks and improve the identification of Grey Sheep users by using histogram intersection to better produce the user-user similarities. Our experimental results based on the MovieLens 100 K rating data demonstrate the ease and effectiveness of our proposed approach in comparison with existing approaches to identify grey sheep users.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The problem of black sheep users is caused by the situation that we do not have rich or even no rating profiles for these users. It is acceptable failure since the problem can be alleviated or solved if these users will continue to leave more ratings on the items.

  2. 2.

    We use \(\Bbbk \) to distinguish it from the K in KNN based UBCF algorithm.

  3. 3.

    https://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/100k/.

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Correspondence to Yong Zheng .

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Zheng, Y., Agnani, M., Singh, M. (2017). Identification of Grey Sheep Users by Histogram Intersection in Recommender Systems. In: Cong, G., Peng, WC., Zhang, W., Li, C., Sun, A. (eds) Advanced Data Mining and Applications. ADMA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10604. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69179-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69179-4_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69178-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69179-4

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