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Personalized recommendation based on review topics

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Abstract

The traditional collaborative filtering algorithm is a successful recommendation technology. The core idea of this algorithm is to calculate user or item similarity based on user ratings and then to predict ratings and recommend items based on similar users’ or similar items’ ratings. However, real applications face a problem of data sparsity because most users provide only a few ratings, such that the traditional collaborative filtering algorithm cannot produce satisfactory results. This paper proposes a new topic model-based similarity and two recommendation algorithms: user-based collaborative filtering with topic model algorithm (UCFTM, in this paper) and item-based collaborative filtering with topic model algorithm (ICFTM, in this paper). Each review is processed using the topic model to generate review topic allocations representing a user’s preference for a product’s different features. The UCFTM algorithm aggregates all topic allocations of reviews by the same user and calculates the user most valued features representing product features that the user most values. User similarity is calculated based on user most valued features, whereas ratings are predicted from similar users’ ratings. The ICFTM algorithm aggregates all topic allocations of reviews for the same product, and item most valued features representing the most valued features of the product are calculated. Item similarity is calculated based on item most valued features, whereas ratings are predicted from similar items’ ratings. Experiments on six data sets from Amazon indicate that when most users give only one review and one rating, our algorithms exhibit better prediction accuracy than other traditional collaborative filtering and state-of-the-art topic model-based recommendation algorithms.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61003254), the National Key Technology R&D Program (No. 2012BAH16F02), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, P.R. China

    Xiaolin Zheng, Weifeng Ding, Jingnan Xu & Deren Chen

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  1. Xiaolin Zheng
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Correspondence to Xiaolin Zheng.

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Zheng, X., Ding, W., Xu, J. et al. Personalized recommendation based on review topics. SOCA 8, 15–31 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11761-013-0140-8

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