A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Collaborative Filtering Considering Time-sequence of Ratings

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in recommender systems which provide users with personalized suggestions for products or services. In particular, researches of collaborative filtering analyzing relations between users and items has become more active because of the Netflix Prize competition. This paper presents the reinforcement learning approach for collaborative filtering. By applying reinforcement learning techniques to the movie rating, we discovered the connection between a time sequence of past ratings and current ratings. For this, we first formulated the collaborative filtering problem as a Markov Decision Process. And then we trained the learning model which reflects the connection between the time sequence of past ratings and current ratings using Q-learning. The experimental results indicate that there is a significant effect on current ratings by the time sequence of past ratings.