recommendations for short profiles.

[Laya Patwa <la...@iitr.ernet.in>]

Hello!
I am using TanimotoCoefficientSimilarity to generate user based
recommendations. It gives good results(recommendations) for users having
considerable sized profiles but no recommendations or very less
recommendations for users with very short profiles.

I want to ask why the size of profile matter? Because I guess that user
based recommendations are generated from the profiles of similar users and
if there is a list of similar users then the asked number of recommendations
should be generated irrespective of the size of the profile.

Cheers,
Laya

Re: recommendations for short profiles.

[Sean Owen <sr...@gmail.com>]

The more items a user is associated to, the more chance that the user
overlaps in several items with other users. This is necessary to
compute any similarity with other users. And then, since any items
*those* users are associated too are eligible for recommendation, it
increases the number of probably quality of recommendations.

So, if I have no associations to any items, nothing can be
recommended. Even if I have a couple items, if nobody else has any
association to them, there can be no recommendations either.

This is a general boot-strapping problem. You can't really make
recommendations until you know a few things about the user. I would
consider encouraging users to express more associations, and, have
some default set of recommendations ready for the case where nothing
can be recommended.

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:50 PM, Laya Patwa<la...@iitr.ernet.in> wrote:
> Hello!
> I am using TanimotoCoefficientSimilarity to generate user based
> recommendations. It gives good results(recommendations) for users having
> considerable sized profiles but no recommendations or very less
> recommendations for users with very short profiles.
>
> I want to ask why the size of profile matter? Because I guess that user
> based recommendations are generated from the profiles of similar users and
> if there is a list of similar users then the asked number of recommendations
> should be generated irrespective of the size of the profile.
>
> Cheers,
> Laya
>