System and method for item recommendations
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsRalf Bertram, Gerhard Schrimpf, Hermann Stamm-Wilbrandt
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Means and a computerized method for recommending items such as books and audio compact disks. For each item, a user profile includes ratings provided by users of the system. Unlike present recommendation systems, the user profiles do not include pre-computed similarity factors measuring similarity between users. Rather, when an advisee requests a recommendation, similarity measures are computed comparing the advisee to other users, and the similarity measures are associated with the other users. A subset of the users is selected, where the subset includes the users most similar to the advisee. A recommendation is made based on the ratings by the members of the selected subset.
Claims7
A computerized method for generating a recommendation of an item to an advisee, comprising the steps of:
- receiving a recommendation request from an advisee for a recommendation by a recommendation system;
- in response to the recommendation request, computing a plurality of similarity factors that indicate similarity between the advisee and a plurality of users of the recommendation system who have previously provided ratings of a plurality of items;
- selecting, from the plurality of users of the recommendation system, neighboring users to the advisee, according to the similarity factors;
- generating a recommendation of at least one item of the plurality of items, according to the previously provided ratings of the plurality of items by the neighboring users.
A user profile for a recommendation system, comprising a plurality of records, each record including a user identifier, an item identifier, and a rating value, wherein each record is linked in a first and a second dimension, the first dimension linking records with a same user identifier in a sequence according to the item identifier, and the second dimension linking records with a same item identifier in a sequence according to the user identifier.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.