Recommendations over domain specific user graphs

Content providers want to make recommendations across multiple interrelated domains such as music and movies. However, existing collaborative filtering methods fail to accurately identify items that may be interesting to the user but that lie in domains that the user has not accessed before. This is mainly because of the paucity of user transactions across multiple item domains. Our method is based on the observation that users who share similar items or who share social connections, can provide recommendation chains (sequences of transitively associated edges) to items in other domains. It first builds domain-specific-usergraphs (DSUGs) whose nodes, users, are linked by weighted edges that reflect user similarity. It then connects the DSUGs via the users who rated items in several domains or via the users who share social connections, to create a cross-domain-user graph (CDUG). It performs Random Walk with Restarts on the CDUG to extract user nodes that are related to the starting user node on the CDUG even though they are not present in the DSUG of the starting user node. It then adds items possessed by those users to the recommendations of the starting node user. Furthermore, to extract many more user nodes, we employ a taxonomy-based similarity measure that states that users are similar if they share the same items and/or same classes. Thus we can set many suitable routes from the starting user node to other user nodes in the CDUG. An evaluation using rating datasets in two interrelated domains and social connection histories of users as extracted from a blog portal, indicates that our method identifies potentially interesting items in other domains with higher accuracy than is possible with existing CF methods.