Item-to-item recommendation based on Contextual Fisher Information

Web recommendation services bear great importance in e-commerce, as they aid the user in navigating through the items that are most relevant to her needs. In a typical Web site, long history of previous activities or purchases by the user is rarely available. Hence in most cases, recommenders propose items that are similar to the most recent ones viewed in the current user session. The corresponding task is called session based item-to-item recommendation. For frequent items, it is easy to present item-to-item recommendations by "people who viewed this, also viewed" lists. However, most of the items belong to the long tail, where previous actions are sparsely available. Another difficulty is the so-called cold start problem, when the item has recently appeared and had no time yet to accumulate sufficient number of transactions. In order to recommend a next item in a session in sparse or cold start situations, we also have to incorporate item similarity models. In this paper we describe a probabilistic similarity model based on Random Fields to approximate item-to-item transition probabilities. We give a generative model for the item interactions based on arbitrary distance measures over the items including explicit, implicit ratings and external metadata. The model may change in time to fit better recent events and recommend the next item based on the updated Fisher Information. Our new model outperforms both simple similarity baseline methods and recent item-to-item recommenders, under several different performance metrics and publicly available data sets. We reach significant gains in particular for recommending a new item following a rare item.