CSE4077 Recommender Systems

Module 1
 Definition
• A recommender system, or a recommendation system, is a subclass of
information filtering system, usually associated with machine learning,
that uses Big Data.

• Recommender systems are trained to understand the preferences,

previous decisions, and characteristics of people and products using data
gathered about their interactions. These include impressions, clicks,
likes, and purchases.
 CONT.

• Because of their capability to predict consumer interests and desires on a

highly personalized level, recommender systems are a favorite with
content and product providers.

• These can be based on various criteria, including past purchases,

search history, demographic information, and other factors
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• The recommender system deals with a large volume of information present by
filtering the most important information based on the data provided by a user and
other factors that take care of the user’s preference and interest.

• It finds out the match between user and item and imputes the similarities between
users and items for recommendation.

• Both the users and the service providers have benefited from these kinds of systems.

• The quality and decision-making process has also improved through these kinds of
systems.
 BENEFITS
1. Improved user experience: Recommendation systems help users discover new products or
content that they might be interested in, based on their previous preferences. This can make the
user experience more personalized and enjoyable.
2. Increased sales and engagement: By showing users relevant recommendations, a
recommendation system can help drive more traffic to a website or an app, and can encourage
users to engage with the content or products being recommended. This can lead to increased
sales and revenue for the business.
3. Enhanced customer loyalty: By providing personalized recommendations, businesses can show
customers that they understand their interests and preferences. This helps build customer loyalty
and encourage customers to return to the site or app in the future.
4. Better targeting of marketing campaigns: Recommendation systems can help businesses gather
data on customer preferences and interests, which can be used to target marketing campaigns
more effectively. This can help businesses reach the right customers with the right messages,
which can lead to improved marketing ROI.
5. Improved efficiency and cost savings: By automating the process of generating
recommendations, businesses can save time and resources that would otherwise be spent on
manual curation of content or products. This can lead to improved efficiency and cost savings.
Targeted Marketing
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 TYPES
1. Collaborative Recommender system
– Collaborative recommender systems aggregate ratings or recommendations of objects, recognize
commonalities between the users on the basis of their ratings, and generate new recommendations
based on inter-user comparisons.
– The greatest strength of collaborative techniques is that they are completely independent of any
machine-readable representation.
2. Content-based recommender system
– In Content-based recommender system, the objects are mainly defined by their associated
features.
– A content-based recommender learns a profile of the new user’s interests based on the features
present, in objects the user has rated.
– It’s basically a keyword specific recommender system here keywords are used to describe the
items.
– Thus, in a content-based recommender system the algorithms used are such that it recommends
users similar items that the user has liked in the past or is examining currently.
 CONT.
3. Demographic based recommender system
– This system aims to categorize the users based on attributes and make
recommendations based on demographic classes.
– Many industries have taken this kind of approach as it’s not that complex and easy to
implement.
– In Demographic-based recommender system the algorithms first need a proper market
research in the specified region accompanied with a short survey to gather data for
categorization.
– Demographic techniques form “people-to-people” correlations like collaborative ones, but
use different data. The benefit of a demographic approach is that it does not require a
history of user ratings like that in collaborative and content based recommender systems.
 CONT.
4. Utility based recommender system
– Utility based recommender system makes suggestions based on computation of the utility of
each object for the user.
– Of course, the central problem for this type of system is how to create a utility for individual
users.
– In utility based system, every industry will have a different technique for arriving at a user
specific utility function and applying it to the objects under consideration.
– The main advantage of using a utility based recommender system is that it can factor non-
product attributes, such as vendor reliability and product availability, into the utility
computation. This makes it possible to check real time inventory of the object and display it to
the user.
5. Knowledge based recommender system
– This type of recommender system attempts to suggest objects based on
inferences about a user’s needs and preferences.
– Knowledge based recommendation works on functional knowledge: they have
knowledge about how a particular item meets a particular user need, and can
therefore reason about the relationship between a need and a possible
recommendation.
6. Hybrid recommender system
– Combining any of the two systems in a manner that suits a particular industry
is known as Hybrid Recommender system.
– This is the most sought after Recommender system that many companies look
after, as it combines the strengths of more than two Recommender system and
also eliminates any weakness which exist when only one recommender system
is used.
 How Recommender System Works?
• Recommender systems leverage machine learning algorithms in order to make
better predictions about a user’s preferences.
• There are a number of different machine learning algorithms that can be used in a
recommender system.
• Each algorithm has its own strengths and weaknesses, and the best algorithm for a particular
application will depend on the nature of the data.
• The most common is the linear regression algorithm. The linear regression algorithm is
used to find the best linear approximation to a data set.
• In a recommender system, this algorithm is used to predict how a user will rate an item
based on their past ratings.
 CONT.

• Other machine learning algorithms that can be used in

Recommender Systems, include some of the following:
– K-NearestNeighbor (K-NN)
– Bayesian inference
– Dimensionality reduction
• Matrix factorization
• Feature extraction
Neural Networks
 Challenges of RS

• Lack of User Activity

• Lack of Data
• New Item Introduction
• Scalability
• Changing Trends
• Wrapping Up
 Basic Models of Recommender Systems
 The basic models for recommender systems work with two kinds of data, which are
 The user-item interactions, such as ratings or buying behavior, and
 the attribute information about the users and items such as textual profiles or relevant
keywords.
 Basic Models of Recommender Systems
 The basic models for recommender systems work with two kinds of data, which are
 The user-item interactions, such as ratings or buying behavior, and
 the attribute information about the users and items such as textual profiles or relevant
keywords.

 Methods that use the former are referred to as collaborative filtering methods, whereas
methods that use the latter are referred to as content-based recommender methods.

 In knowledge-based recommender systems, the recommendations are based on explicitly

specified user requirements. Instead of using historical rating or buying data, external
knowledge bases and constraints are used to create the recommendation.

 Some recommender systems combine these different aspects to create hybrid systems.
Hybrid systems can combine the strengths of various types of recommendersystems to
create techniques that can perform more robustly in a wide variety of settings.
 Basic Models of Recommender Systems

1. Collaborative Filtering Models

 Types of Ratings
 Relationship with Missing Value Analysis
 Collaborative Filtering as a Generalization of Classification and Regression Modelling

2. Content-Based Recommender Systems

3. Knowledge-Based Recommender Systems
 Utility-Based Recommender Systems

4. Demographic Recommender Systems

5. Hybrid and Ensemble-Based Recommender Systems
6. Evaluation of Recommender Systems
 Collaborative filtering models
 Collaborative filtering models use the collaborative power of the ratings provided by
multiple users to make recommendations.
 The main challenge in designing collaborative filtering methods is that the
underlying ratings matrices are sparse.
 Consider an example of a movie application in which users specify ratings indicating
their like or dislike of specific movies.
 There are two types of methods that are commonly used in collaborative filtering,
which are referred to as memory-based methods and model-based methods.
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 In knowledge-based recommender systems, the recommendations are based on
explicitly specified user requirements. Instead of using historical rating or buying
data, external knowledge bases and constraints are used to create the
recommendation.
• Some recommender systems combine these different aspects to create hybrid
systems. Hybrid systems can combine the strengths of various types of recommender
systems to create techniques that can perform more robustly in a wide variety of
settings.
Knowledge Base RS - constraint-based
recommender
Knowledge Base RS - case-based recommender
CONT.
Paradigms of recommender systems

Knowledge-based: "Tell me what fits

based on my needs"
Paradigms of recommender systems

Hybrid: combinations of various inputs

and/or composition of different
mechanism
Domain-Specific Challenges in Recommender Systems
 Context-Based Recommender Systems
 Time-Sensitive Recommender Systems
 Location-Based Recommender Systems
 Social Recommender Systems
a. Structural Recommendation of Nodes and Links
b. Product and Content Recommendations with Social Influence
c. Trustworthy Recommender Systems
d. Leveraging Social Tagging Feedback for Recommendations
 Context-Based Recommender Systems
• In different domains, such as temporal data, location-based data, and social data, the context of the
recommendation plays a critical role.
• Therefore, the notion of contextual recommender systems was developed to address the additional
side information that arises in these domains.
• This notion is used with different modifications for various types of data, such as temporal data,
location data, or social data.

• Context-based or context-aware recommender systems take various types of contextual information

into account, while making recommendations. Such contextual information could include time,
location, or social data.
– For example, the types of clothes recommended by a retailer might depend both on the season and the location of the
customer.
– Another example is the case in which a particular type of festival or holiday affects the underlying customer activity.
• It has generally been observed that the use of such contextual information can greatly improve the
effectiveness of the recommendation process.
 Time-Sensitive Recommender Systems
• In many settings, the recommendations for an item might evolve with time.
• For example, the recommendations for a movie may be very different at the time of release from the
recommendations received several years later. In such cases, it is extremely important to incorporate temporal
knowledge in the recommendation process. The temporal aspect in such recommender systems can be reflected
in several ways:

1. The rating of an item might evolve with time, as community attitudes evolve and the interests of users
change over time. User interests, likes, dislikes, and fashions inevitably evolve with time.
2. The rating of an item might be dependent on the specific time of day, day of week, month, or season. For
example, it makes little sense to recommend winter clothing during the summer, or raincoats during the dry
season.

• The first type of recommender system is created by incorporating time as an explicit parameter in collaborative
filtering systems.
• The second type can be viewed as a special case of context-based recommender systems.
• Temporal recommender systems are challenging because of the fact that the matrix of ratings is sparse, and the
use of specific temporal context aggravates the sparsity problem. Therefore, it is particularly important to have
access to large data sets in these settings.
 Location-Based Recommender Systems
• With the increasing popularity of GPS-enabled mobile phones, consumers are often interested in
location-based recommendations. For example, a traveling user may wish to determine the closest
restaurant based on her previous history of ratings for other restaurants.
• In general, the recommendation of places always has a location aspect built into it.

• An example of such a system is Foursquare2, which recommends various types of places such as
restaurants or nightlife venues. There are two types of spatial locality that are common to such
systems:

1. User-specific locality: The geographical location of a user has an important role in her
preferences. For example, a user from Wisconsin might not have the same
movie preferences as a user from New York. This type of locality is
referred to as preference locality.
2. Item-specific locality: The geographical location of an item (e.g., restaurant) might have an
impact on the relevance of the item, depending on the current location of the
user. Users are generally not willing to travel very far from their current
location. This type of locality is referred to as travel locality.
 Social Recommender Systems
• Social recommender systems are based on network structures, social cues and tags, or a combination of these
various network aspects.
• In general, the recommender systems that are based on social cues and tags are slightly different from those that
are based purely on structural aspects.
• Recommender systems, which are based purely on structural aspects, are used to suggest nodes and links within
the network itself.
• On the other hand, social recommender systems may be also be used to recommend various products with the use
of social cues.
• It is important to note that the utility of structural recommender systems extends beyond social networks, because
such methods are applied to various types of Web-enabled networks.
 Structural Recommendation of Nodes and Links

• Various types of networks, including social networks, are composed of nodes and links. In many
cases, it is desirable to recommend nodes and links.
• For example, a personalized Web search may require a recommendation of material which is related
to a particular topic. Since the Web can be viewed as a graph, such methods can be viewed as a node
recommendation problem.
• The problem of node recommendation is closely related to the problem of Web search. In fact, both
problems require the use of various forms of ranking algorithms.
• A key component of these methods is the use of the PageRank algorithm, although the
personalization of such algorithms is more closely related to recommendation algorithms. Therefore,
such algorithms are also referred to as personalized PageRank algorithms.
 Product and Content Recommendations with Social Influence

• Many forms of product and content recommendation are performed with

the help of network connections and other social cues.
• This problem is also referred to as viral marketing. In viral marketing,
products are recommended with the use of word-of-mouth systems.
• In order to achieve this goal, it is important to be able to determine
influential and topically relevant entities in the network.
• This problem is referred to as influence analysis in social networks
 Trustworthy Recommender Systems

• Many social media sites allow users to express their trust and distrust in one another,
either in a direct way, or through various feedback mechanisms.

• For example, users can express their trust or distrust in reviews of other users, or
they may directly specify their trust or distrust relationships with other users. This
trust information is very useful for making more robust recommendations.

• For example, it is evident that a user-based neighborhood method should be

computed with the use of trustworthy peers to obtain robust recommendations.
 Leveraging Social Tagging Feedback for Recommendations

• Users have numerous methods for incorporating their feedback in recommender

systems. The most common form of feedback is social tagging. Such forms of
feedback are particularly common on content sharing sites on the Web.

• Tags are meta-data that users utilize to add short informative keywords to the
content.

• For example, a user on a music site might tag Michael Jackson’s Thriller album as
“rock.” Such tags provide useful information about the interests of both the user and
the content of the item because the tag is associated with both. The tags serve as
useful context for performing the recommendations.
 Application Domains

• Recommender systems are used in numerous application domains, such as retail,

music, content, Web search, querying, and computational advertisements. Some of
these domains require specialized methods for adapting recommender systems. All
these application domains are Web centric in nature.
• An important aspect of recommender systems is that they assume the existence of
strong user-identification mechanisms in order to track and identify long-term user
interests.
• In many Web domains, mechanisms for strong user identification may not be
available. In such cases, direct user of recommendation technology may not be
feasible.
DISCUSSION SESSION
CONT.
CONT.
 Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering algorithms
• Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering algorithms, also referred to as memory-based
algorithms, were among the earliest algorithms developed for collaborative filtering.

• There are two primary types of neighborhood-based algorithms:

1. User-based collaborative filtering: In this case, the ratings provided by similar
users to a target user A are used to make recommendations for A. The predicted
ratings of A are computed as the weighted average values of these “peer group” ratings for
each item.
2. Item-based collaborative filtering: In order to make recommendations for target
item B, the first step is to determine a set S of items, which are most similar to item B.
Then, in order to predict the rating of any particular user A for item B, the ratings in set S,
which are specified by A, are determined. The weighted average of these ratings is
used to compute the predicted rating of user A for item B.
 CONT.
• An important distinction between user-based collaborative filtering and item-based collaborative filtering
algorithms is that the ratings in the former case are predicted using the ratings of neighboring
users, whereas the ratings in the latter case are predicted using the user’s own ratings on
neighboring (i.e., closely related) items.

• Like all other collaborative filtering algorithms, neighborhood-based collaborative filtering algorithms
can be formulated in one of two ways:

1. Predicting the rating value of a user-item combination: This is the simplest and most primitive
formulation of a recommender system. In this case, the missing rating of the user u for item j is
predicted.

2. Determining the top-k items or top-k users: In most practical settings, the merchant is not
necessarily looking for specific ratings values of user-item combinations. Rather, it is more
interesting to learn the top-k most relevant items for a particular user, or the top-k most relevant
users for a particular item.
Rating Matric
 Key Properties of Ratings Matrices

• Assume that the ratings matrix is denoted by R, and it is an m × n

matrix containing ‘m’ users and ‘n’ items. Therefore, the rating of
user u for item j is denoted by Ruj .
• Only a small subset of the entries in the ratings matrix are
typically specified.
• The specified entries of the matrix are referred to as the training
data, whereas the unspecified entries of the matrix are referred to
as the test data.
 Rating Matric
• Ratings can be defined in a variety of ways, depending on the application at hand:
– Continuous ratings: The ratings are specified on a continuous scale, corresponding to the
level of like or dislike of the item at hand.
– Interval-based ratings: In interval-based ratings, the ratings are often drawn from a 5-
point or 7-point scale, although 10-point and 20-point scales are also possible.
– Ordinal ratings: Ordinal ratings are much like interval-based ratings, except that ordered
categorical values may be used. Examples of such ordered categorical values might be
responses such as “Strongly Disagree,” “Disagree,” “Neutral,” “Agree,” and “Strongly
Agree.”
– Binary ratings: In the case of binary ratings, only two options are present, corresponding
to positive or negative responses. Binary ratings can be considered a special case of both
interval-based and ordinal ratings.
– Unary ratings: Such systems allow the user to specify a positive preference for an item,
but there is no mechanism to specify a negative preference. This is often the case in many
real-world settings, such as the use of a “like” button on Facebook.
 Predicting Ratings with Neighborhood-Based Methods

• The basic idea in neighborhood-based methods is to use either

user-user similarity or item-item similarity to make
recommendations from a ratings matrix.
• The concept of a neighborhood implies that we need to determine
either similar users or similar items in order to make predictions.
 CONT.
• There are two basic principles used in neighborhood-based
models:
– 1. User-based models: Similar users have similar ratings on the same
item. Therefore, if Alice and Bob have rated movies in a similar way in the
past, then one can use Alice’s observed ratings on the movie Terminator
to predict Bob’s unobserved ratings on this movie.

– 2. Item-based models: Similar items are rated in a similar way by the

same user. Therefore, Bob’s ratings on similar science fiction movies like
Alien and Predator can be used to predict his rating on Terminator.
 CONT.
• Since the collaborative filtering problem can be viewed as a
generalization of the classification/ regression modeling problem,
neighborhood-based methods can be viewed as generalizations
of nearest neighbor classifiers in the machine learning literature.

• Unlike classification, where the nearest neighbors are always

determined only on the basis of row similarity, it is possible to find
the nearest neighbors in collaborative filtering on the basis of
either rows or columns.
 Comparing User-Based and Item-Based Methods
• Item-based methods often provide more relevant recommendations because of the
fact that an user’s own ratings are used to perform the recommendation.
• In item-based methods, similar items are identified to a target item, and the user’s
own ratings on those items are used to extrapolate the ratings of the target.
• For example, similar items to a target historical movie might be a set of other
historical movies.
• This is not the case for user-based methods in which the ratings are extrapolated
from other users, who might have overlapping but different interests.
• As a result, item-based methods often exhibit better accuracy.
CONT.
 Strengths and Weaknesses of Neighborhood-Based
Methods
• Neighborhood methods have several advantages related to their simplicity and
intuitive approach. Because of the simple and intuitive approach of these methods,
they are easy to implement and debug.
• It is often easy to justify why a specific item is recommended, and the interpretability
of item-based methods is particularly notable.
• Furthermore, the recommendations are relatively stable with the addition of new
items and users. It is also possible to create incremental approximations of these
methods.
• The main disadvantage of these methods is that the offline phase can sometimes be
impractical in large-scale settings. The offline phase of the user-based method
requires at least
 Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering algorithms
• Neighborhood-based collaborative filtering algorithms, also referred to as memory-based
algorithms, were among the earliest algorithms developed for collaborative filtering.

• There are two primary types of neighborhood-based algorithms:

1. User-based collaborative filtering: In this case, the ratings provided by similar
users to a target user A are used to make recommendations for A. The predicted
ratings of A are computed as the weighted average values of these “peer group” ratings for
each item.
2. Item-based collaborative filtering: In order to make recommendations for target
item B, the first step is to determine a set S of items, which are most similar to item B.
Then, in order to predict the rating of any particular user A for item B, the ratings in set S,
which are specified by A, are determined. The weighted average of these ratings is
used to compute the predicted rating of user A for item B.
CONT.
User-based nearest-neighbor
collaborative filtering
User-based nearest-neighbor collaborative filtering
Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5
Alice 5 3 4 4 ?
User1 3 1 2 3 3
User2 4 3 4 3 5
User3 3 3 1 5 4
User4 1 5 5 2 1
 User-based nearest-neighbor collaborative filtering
• Example
– A database of ratings of the current user, Alice, and some other users is given:

Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5

Alice 5 3 4 4 ?
User1 3 1 2 3 3
User2 4 3 4 3 5
User3 3 3 1 5 4
User4 1 5 5 2 1

– Determine whether Alice will like or dislike Item5, which Alice has not yet rated or seen
 User-based nearest-neighbor collaborative filtering

• Some first questions

– How do we measure similarity?
– How many neighbors should we consider?
– How do we generate a prediction from the neighbors' ratings?

Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5

Alice 5 3 4 4 ?
User1 3 1 2 3 3
User2 4 3 4 3 5
User3 3 3 1 5 4
User4 1 5 5 2 1
Measuring user similarity (1)-Raw Cosine Similarity

Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5

Alice 5 3 4 4 ?
User1 3 1 2 3 3
User2 4 3 4 3 5
User3 3 3 1 5 4
User4 1 5 5 2 1
Measuring user similarity (2)
 Measuring user similarity (2)

Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5 Mean

Alice 5 3 4 4 ? 4
User1 3 1 2 3 3 2.4
User2 4 3 4 3 5 3.8
User3 3 3 1 5 4 3.2
User4 1 5 5 2 1 2.8
Making predictions
 Item-based collaborative filtering
• Basic idea:
– Use the similarity between items (and not users) to make predictions
• Example:
– Look for items that are similar to Item5
– Take Alice's ratings for these items to predict the rating for Item5

Item1 Item2 Item3 Item4 Item5

Alice 5 3 4 4 ?
User1 3 1 2 3 3
User2 4 3 4 3 5
User3 3 3 1 5 4
User4 1 5 5 2 1
The cosine similarity measure
 Making predictions

• A common prediction function:

• Neighborhood size is typically also limited to a

specific size
• Not all neighbors are taken into account for the
prediction
SOLVED PROBLEM
Pearson correlation coefficient
Mean-Centered Rating (To Avoid Bias due to
competitors)
 MEAN – CENTERED RATING PREDICTION

• User 1 and User 2

Item-Based Neighborhood
Models
Item-Based Neighborhood Models
 Improving the metrics / prediction function
• Not all neighbor ratings might be equally "valuable"
– Agreement on commonly liked items is not so informative as agreement on controversial
items
– Possible solution: Give more weight to items that have a higher variance
• Value of number of co-rated items
– Use "significance weighting", by e.g., linearly reducing the weight when the number of
co-rated items is low
• Case amplification
– Intuition: Give more weight to "very similar" neighbors, i.e., where the similarity value is
close to 1.
• Neighborhood selection
– Use similarity threshold or fixed number of neighbors
 Memory-based and model-based approaches
• User-based CF is said to be "memory-based"
– the rating matrix is directly used to find neighbors / make predictions
– does not scale for most real-world scenarios
– large e-commerce sites have tens of millions of customers and millions of items
• Model-based approaches
– based on an offline pre-processing or "model-learning" phase
– at run-time, only the learned model is used to make predictions
– models are updated / re-trained periodically
– large variety of techniques used
– model-building and updating can be computationally expensive
– item-based CF is an example for model-based approaches
Clustering and Neighborhood-
Based Methods
Clustering and Neighborhood-Based Methods
 SOLVED PROBLEM
• Step 1 : Calculate Similarity based on distance function

There are many distance functions but Euclidean is the

most commonly used measure. It is mainly used when data
is continuous. Manhattan distance is also very common for
continuous variables.
 Step 2 : Find K-Nearest Neighbors
• New User Monica – Height 161, Weight 61

• Let k be 5.
• Then the algorithm searches for the 5
customers closest to Monica, i.e. most similar to
Monica in terms of attributes, and see what
categories those 5 customers were in.
• If 4 of them had ‘Medium T shirt sizes’ and 1
had ‘Large T shirt size’ then your best guess for
Monica is ‘Medium T shirt.
• See the calculation shown in the snapshot
below -
 STEP 3: FINAL RECOMMENDATION USING
CLUSTER DISTANCE
• New customer
information is exhibited
in yellow circle. Four
blue highlighted data
points and one orange
highlighted data point
are close to yellow
circle. so the prediction
for the new case is
blue highlighted data
point which is Medium
T-shirt size.
CONT.
 GRAPH BASED
RECOMMENDATION MODEL
 Graph-based methods (1)

• "Spreading activation" (Huang et al. 2004)

– Exploit the supposed "transitivity" of customer tastes and thereby augment the matrix with additional information
– Assume that we are looking for a recommendation for User1
– When using a standard CF approach, User2 will be considered a peer for User1 because they both bought
Item2 and Item4
– Thus Item3 will be recommended to User1 because the nearest neighbor, User2, also bought or liked it
 Graph-based methods (2)

• "Spreading activation" (Huang et al. 2004)

– In a standard user-based or item-based CF approach, paths of length 3 will be considered – that is, Item3 is
relevant for User1 because there exists a three-step path (User1–Item2–User2–Item3) between them
– Because the number of such paths of length 3 is small in sparse rating databases, the idea is to also consider
longer paths (indirect associations) to compute recommendations
– Using path length 5, for instance
 Graph-based methods (3)
• "Spreading activation" (Huang et al. 2004)
– Idea: Use paths of lengths > 3
to recommend items
– Length 3: Recommend Item3 to User1
– Length 5: Item1 also recommendable
 Bipartite graphs - recommendation example
• The model uses 2 formulas. The first one computes the weight
between 2 users. The weight can be considered as the similarity
measure because it takes all n products common for both users:

• The second formula computes the similarity score between a user

and an item, based on the user's neighbors who interacted with
the item:
 Weighted Association Similarity Scheme (Katz Measure)
Weighting scheme is used to combine the two
similarity measures to form the final book similarity

Compute Weighted Association ??

Association Weight (a,b)= Weight(link(a)) * Weight

(link(b))

1-degree : C1 to B2 = 0.5
2-degree : C1-B2-B1 = 0.5*0.6= 0.3
3-degree : C1 to B1,
C1-C2- B2-B1 = 0.7*0.5*0.6 = 0.21
C1-B2-B3-B1 = 0.12
C1-C2-B3-B1 =0.28

Top Recommended book for C1 = B1, B3