Extending a Tag-based Collaborative Recommender with Co-occurring Information Interests

Collaborative Filtering is largely applied to personalize item recommendation but its performance is affected by the sparsity of rating data. In order to address this issue, recent systems have been developed to improve recommendation by extracting latent factors from the rating matrices, or by exploiting trust relations established among users in social networks. In this work, we are interested in evaluating whether other sources of preference information than ratings and social ties can be used to improve recommendation performance. Specifically, we aim at testing whether the integration of frequently co-occurring interests in information search logs can improve recommendation performance in User-to-User Collaborative Filtering (U2UCF). For this purpose, we propose the Extended Category-based Collaborative Filtering (ECCF) recommender, which enriches category-based user profiles derived from the analysis of rating behavior with data categories that are frequently searched together by people in search sessions. We test our model using a big rating dataset and a log of a largely used search engine to extract the co-occurrence of interests. The experiments show that ECCF outperforms U2UCF and category-based collaborative recommendation in accuracy, MRR, diversity of recommendations and user coverage. Moreover, it outperforms the SVD++ Matrix Factorization algorithm in accuracy and diversity of recommendation lists.