3.1 Notation We use the following notation in describing schemes. The ratings from a given user, called an evaluation,
is represented as an incomplete array u, where u is the rating of this user gives to item i. The subset of the set of items consisting of all those items which are rated in u is S(u). The set of all evaluations in the training set is χ. The number of elements in a set S is card(S). The average of ratings in an evaluation u is denoted ¯u. The set Sii(χ) is the set of all evaluations u ∈ χ such that they contain item i (i ∈ S(u)).
Given two evaluations u, v, we define the scalar product hu, vi as ∑ i∈S(u)∩S(v)uiv. Predictions, which we write P(u), represent a vector where each component is the prediction corresponding to one item: predictions depend implicitly on the training set χ.