That's a good word -- smoothing. Yes, I can see why this is an actual advantage in practice. You end up with less sparsity.
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Summarize yes. > > But this is, actually, theoretically better because the summarization > introduces useful smoothing. That way you get recommendations for items > even if there is no direct overlap. > > Your point about noisy is trenchant because small count data is inherently > noisy because you can't have an exact 0.04 of an observation. Small counts > dominate in recommendations.
