Appears in Proceedings of the SIGIR-2001 Workshop on Recommender Systems , New Orleans , LA , September 2001 Content-Boosted Collaborative Filtering

Most recommender systems use Collaborative Filtering or Content-based methods to predict new items of interest for a user. While both methods have their own advantages, individually they fail to provide good recommendations in many situations. Incorporating components from both methods, a hybrid recommender system can overcome these shortcomings. In this paper, we present an elegant and e ective framework for combining content and collaboration. Our approach uses a content-based predictor to enhance existing user data, and then provides personalized suggestions through collaborative ltering. We present experimental results that show how this approach, Content-Boosted Collaborative Filtering, performs better than a pure content-based predictor, pure collaborative lter, and a naive hybrid approach. We also discuss methods to improve the performance of our hybrid system.