A probabilistic model for user interest propagation in recommender systems

User interests modeling has been exploited as a critical component to improve the predictive performance of recommender systems. However, with the absence of explicit information to model user interests, most approaches to recommender systems exploit users activities (user generated contents or user ratings) to inference the interest of users. In reality, the relationship among users also serves as a rich source of information of shared interest. To this end, we propose a framework which avoids the sole dependence of user activities to infer user interests and allows the exploitation of the direct relationship between users to propagate user interests to improve system's performance. In this paper, we advocate a novel modeling framework. We construct a probabilistic user interests model and propose a user interests propagation algorithm (UIP), which applies a factor graph based approach to estimate the distribution of the interests of users. Moreover, we incorporate our UIP algorithm with conventional matrix factorization (MF) for recommender systems. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms previous methods used for recommender systems

31th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems.The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstractionlevels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases arecontinuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas ofinformation modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers