Daniel Lemire's blog

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What makes recommender systems work?

2 thoughts on “What makes recommender systems work?”

  1. 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

  2. marcel says:

    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.