Comments on: What makes recommender systems work? http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2008/12/31/what-makes-recommender-systems-work/ Computer Scientist and Open Scholar: Databases, Information Retrieval, Business Intelligence. Thu, 24 May 2012 04:06:27 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 By: marcel http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2008/12/31/what-makes-recommender-systems-work/comment-page-1/#comment-50513 marcel Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:30:33 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/?p=1700#comment-50513 I disagree in the last paragraph. Diversity is essential to predict tastes. Having a "delta function" in the data (ratings -> correlation etc.) means no information, hence no prediction power. A broad distribution of tastes always leads to better results. To predict blockbusters is an easy task, but not very useful. I claim: collaborative filtering works because of divergent tastes. The more divergent the better. I disagree in the last paragraph. Diversity is essential to predict tastes. Having a “delta function” in the data (ratings -> correlation etc.) means no information, hence no prediction power. A broad distribution of tastes always leads to better results. To predict blockbusters is an easy task, but not very useful. I claim: collaborative filtering works because of divergent tastes. The more divergent the better.

]]> By: Daniel Tunkelang http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2008/12/31/what-makes-recommender-systems-work/comment-page-1/#comment-50470 Daniel Tunkelang Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:05:33 +0000 http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/?p=1700#comment-50470 Nice, I didn't realize you were a fan of the heuristics and biases literature. I recommend you read George Loewenstein and Dan Ariely if you haven't already. http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/src/faculty/loewenstein.php http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/papers.shtml Nice, I didn’t realize you were a fan of the heuristics and biases literature. I recommend you read George Loewenstein and Dan Ariely if you haven’t already.

http://sds.hss.cmu.edu/src/faculty/loewenstein.php

http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/papers.shtml

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