Data Mining, or Knowledge Discovery as it is also known, is becoming increasingly useful in a wide variety of applications. In the following paper, we look at its use in combating some of the traditional issues faced with rec-ommender systems. We discuss our ongoing work which aims to enhance the performance of PTV, an applied recommender system working in the TV listings domain. This system currently combines the results of separate user-based collaborative and case-based components to recommend programs to users. Our extension to this idea operates on the theory of developing a case-based view of the collaborative component itself. By using data mining techniques to extract relationships between programme items, we can address the sparsity/maintenance problem. We also adopt a unique approach to recommendation ranking which combines user similarities and item similarities to provide more effective recommendation orderings. Experimental results corroborate our ideas, demonstrating the effectiveness of data mining in improving recommender systems by providing similarity knowledge to address sparsity, both at user-based recommendation level and recommendation ranking level.
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