Collaborative future event recommendation

Abstract

We demonstrate a method for collaborative ranking of future events. Previous work on recommender systems typically relies on feedback on a particular item, such as a movie, and generalizes this to other items or other people. In contrast, we examine a setting where no feedback exists on the particular item. Because direct feedback does not exist for events that have not taken place, we recommend them based on individuals' preferences for past events, combined collaboratively with other peoples' likes and dislikes. We examine the topic of unseen item recommendation through a user study of academic (scientific) talk recommendation, where we aim to correctly estimate a ranking function for each user, predicting which talks would be of most interest to them. Then by decomposing user parameters into shared and individual dimensions, we induce a similarity metric between users based on the degree to which they share these dimensions. We show that the collaborative ranking predictions of future events are more effective than pure content-based recommendation. Finally, to further reduce the need for explicit user feedback, we suggest an active learning approach for eliciting feedback and a method for incorporating available implicit user cues.