23.3 Active Learning in Recommender Systems
With Traditional AL, users are asked to rate a set of preselected items. This is often
at the time of enrollment, though a preselected list may be presented to existing users
at a later date as well. It may be argued that since these items are selected by experts,
they capture essential properties for determining a user’s preferences. Conceptually
this may sound promising, but in practice this often leads towards selecting items
that best predict the preferences of only an average user. Since the idea of RS is
to provide personalized recommendations, selecting items to rate in a personalized
manner should readily make more sense.