Probabilistic partial user model similarity for collaborative filtering

Recommender systems play an important role in supporting people getting items they like. One type of recommender systems is user-based collaborative filtering. The fundamental assumption of user-based collaborative filtering is that people who share similar preferences for common items behave similar in the future. The similarity of user preferences is computed globally on common rated items such that partial preference similarities might be missed. Consequently, valuable ratings of partially similar users are ignored. Furthermore, two users may even have similar preferences but the set of common rated items is too small to infer preference similarity. We propose first, an approach that computes user preference similarities based on learned user preference models and second, we propose a method to compute partial user preference similarities based on partial user model similarities. For users with few common rated items, we show that user similarity based on preferences significantly outperforms user similarity based on common rated items.