Enhancing Recommender Diversity Using Gaussian Cloud Transformation

Abstract

The recommender systems community is paying great attention to diversity as key qualities beyond accuracy in real recommendation scenarios. Multifarious diversity-increasing approaches have been developed to enhance recommendation diversity in the related literature while making personalized recommendations to users. In this work, we present Gaussian Cloud Recommendation Algorithm (GCRA), a novel method designed to balance accuracy and diversity personalized top-N recommendation lists in order to capture the user's complete spectrum of tastes. Our proposed algorithm does not require semantic information. Meanwhile we propose a unified framework to extend the traditional CF algorithms via utilizing GCRA for improving the recommendation system performance. Our work builds upon prior research on recommender systems. Though being detrimental to average accuracy, we show that our method can capture the user's complete spectrum of interests. Systematic experiments on three real-world data sets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed approach in learning both accuracy and diversity.