Cascade Hybrid Recommendation as a Combination of One-Class Classification and Collaborative Filtering

摘要

In this paper, we formulate the recommendation problem as a hybrid combination of one-class classification with collaborative filtering. Specifically, we decompose the recommendation problem into a two-level cascade scheme. In the first level, only desirable items are selected for each user from the large amount of all possible items, taking into account only a small portion of his/her available preferences. This is achieved via a one-class classification scheme trained only with positives examples, i.e. only with desirable items for which users have provided a rating value. In the second level, a collaborative filtering approach is applied to assign a rating degree to the items identified at the first level. The efficiency of our approach is analyzed theoretically in terms of best/worst case scenarios and respective lower/upper mean absolute error (MAE) bounds are computed. Moreover, our approach is experimentally tested against pure collaborative and cascade content-based approaches. The results show that our approach outperforms them in terms of MAE and, moreover, the experimental MAE is close to the theoretical lower bound corresponding to the best case scenario. The superiority of our approach is due to the existence of the one class classifier in the first level of the cascade.