combination of content-based and collaborative methods to
suggest items of interest to users, and also to learn and exploit
item semantics. Recommender systems typically use techniques
from collaborative filtering, in which proximity measures
between users are formulated to generate recommendations,
or content-based filtering, in which users are compared
directly to items. Our approach uses similarity measures between
users, but also directly measures the attributes of items
that make them appealing to specific users. This can be used
to directly make recommendations to users, but equally importantly
it allows these recommendations to be justified. We
introduce a method for predicting the preference of a user for
a movie by estimating the user’s attitude toward features with
which other users have described that movie.
We show that this method allows for accurate recommendations
for a sub-population of users, but not for the entire user
population. We describe a hybrid approach in which a userspecific
recommendation mechanism is learned and experimentally
evaluated. It appears that such a recommender system
can achieve significant improvements in accuracy over
alternative methods, while also retaining other advantages.