2014年11月1日星期六

Recommendation Systems, Effective Weapons Against Choice-Phobia !

Happy Halloween! This Friday is the Halloween, festival encounters with weekends. It is such a fantastic opportunity for people to relax themselves. Actually, there are so many methods for people to relax. For instance, watching movies in the theatre, enjoying a banquet in the restaurant, playing sports games with friends and so on. For the most of the time, we spend much time considering, “which method is the most appropriate for me at present”. I believe this is a common phenomenon in our daily lives. Generally speaking, when we have to make choices, if there are no thoughtful recommendations, it is challenging for people to select a perfect choice.

So here comes the problem, is there any reliable method for people to make correct choice? In other word, we are looking for some scientific recommendation mechanisms, which are able to recommend things or persons which are perfectly suitable for us. During the last two weeks, on Prof. Rosanna’s class, we are actually focusing on this issue.

The concept of “recommendation mechanism” refers to recommender systems actually. They are some specific computational solutions which use computer to process the huge amount of information and do the filtering for users. They are able to analyze the tastes and preferences of different users, except from taking care of people, these systems also pay attention to items. They have the capability of analyzing the characteristics of different items. Finally, they will generate personalized recommendation based on users’ past activities and feedback.

Several recommendation methods are mentioned in the class. Let us take the content-based recommendation (CBR) as an example. If I am the recommendation service provider. When someone asks me for assistance, it is a wise choice to check this client’s history. Namely, to find out the products and services he had received. In most cases, recommend items which are similar to his history will not cause problems. Nevertheless, one person’s past activities belong to personal privacy. It is difficult or even illegal to sniff any information about that. Under this circumstance, it is necessary to transfer our attention from items to users. Here, another recommendation method is adopted. Collaborative filtering (CF). When we are doing research on users themselves, several approaches may be applied. For instance, grouping similar users, generating recommendation reports basing on user-item interactions rather than users or items themselves.

Afterwards, lots of mathematical derivations are made in the class. Franking speaking, they look complex and sophisticated, more time is needed for me to make further research on them. In a word, in spite of these phenomena about having-difficulty-in-choosing look normal in our daily social lives, there also exist a lot of profound theories behind them.


Hello November, please be good!

7 条评论:

  1. Recommender systems become more and more important in recent years since we have to make many decisions every day. It is also one of the reasons why recommender systems are widely adopted in many websites. Maybe we can learn it together and share our thoughts with each other.

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    1. That is true, usually, we encounter these kinds of problems, wish Rosanna's class will teach us how to cope with them. :-)

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  2. In most cases, the Recommendation Systems will return an appropriate reasult but sometimes it may mislead the Choice-Phobia subjected to the accuracy of this system. Therefore, I don't think we should rely on the Recommendation Systems to make choices for us.

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    1. Your idea is unique. I totally agree with you, recommendation system is a kind of tools after all. We cannot rely on them badly.

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  3. 1 dilemma of commendation system may be the efficience.Some guys with crazy ideas should be kick out the database as to get decent result...

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  4. Choice-phobia is a symptoms that many people have. A lot of them even don't really know what themselves want. If we can discover an effective way to help the majority solve the choice-phobia problem. It may be a huge opportunity!

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  5. Actually, the recommending system is everywhere in our daily life. When we go shopping the SA will recommend based on the information she receive from us. When designing the algorithm, we need to think deeply about the input factors and how to group those factors.

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