Hello,

Thanks for the pointers, Grant.  Regarding that Amazon item-item 
recommendation.  It looks like that's patented:

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=2&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PTXT&S1=amazon.ASNM.&OS=AN/(amazon)&RS=AN/amazon

Does that mean one cannot implement this in Taste (or any other piece of 
software)?  Even if used in non-shopping purposes?


Thanks,
Otis


----- Original Message ----
> From: Grant Ingersoll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [email protected]
> Sent: Monday, September 29, 2008 9:43:58 AM
> Subject: Re: Recommending when working with binary data sets
> 
> Not sure I know the answer in terms of Taste, but did a little bit of  
> digging (mind you, I'm no CF expert, but I'm learning thanks to Taste  
> and Sean).
> 
> At any rate, came across:
> Started at Wikipedia's page: 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_filtering
> 
> which lead to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slope_One, which then has  
> an interesting comment about Amazon's item-item approach, which, via  
> Google Scholar leads to:
> 
> http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/site/dsonline/menuitem.9ed3d9924aeb0dcd82ccc6716bbe36ec/index.jsp?&pName=dso_level1&path=dsonline/2003_Archives/0301/d&file=wp1lind.xml&xsl=article.xsl&;jsessionid=LghY1grHgYJpBTLpWjX5NtvQwhH1Bkv9rpfXT4VnpVtDNVpfZ8n0!-1404507079
> 
> In particular, see the "How it Works" section.  Essentially, it  
> describes how they build the item to item similarity matrix, which I  
> believe is also what you need to do.
> 
> HTH,
> Grant
> 
> On Sep 26, 2008, at 1:52 PM, Otis Gospodnetic wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been reading the chapter on recommendations in Programming  
> > Collective Intelligence and looking at Taste.  The examples in PCI  
> > all assume scenarios where items to recommend have been rated by  
> > users on some scale.  I understand how items can be recommended to  
> > users using item-based filtering and user-item ratings and why this  
> > is preferred over user-based filtering when the number of users is  
> > larger than the number of items.
> > But what if all I've got is item-item similarity (content-based) and  
> > there are no user-item ratings?  Say I have a situation where people  
> > simply either consume content (e.g. read an article, watch a  
> > video...) or not consume it (don't read an article, don't watch the  
> > video...).  In other words, I really have only yes/no or 1/0 or seen/ 
> > not seen type "rating".
> >
> > I can't really use Euclidean distance or Pearson correlation  
> > coefficient, can I?
> >
> > What do people use in such scenarios?  Would it make sense to use 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaccard_index 
> >  for such cases?
> > ... Ah, I do see javadoc in TanimotoCoefficientSimilarity saying  
> > exactly that, good.
> >
> > But then my question is:
> > Doesn't the use of Jaccard/Tanimoto mean going back to the expensive  
> > user-user similarity computation?
> >
> > That is, if I need to recommend items for user U1 don't I need to:
> > 1) have user-user similarity pre-computed (and recomputed  
> > periodically)
> > 2) find top N users U{2,3,4,...N} who are the most similar to U1
> > 3) then for these top N most similar users find their "seen" items  
> > that U1 has not seen (possibly limit this to only recently seen items)
> > 4) select top N items from 3) and recommend those to U1.
> >
> > If so, then 1) is again expensive.
> > And what how would one go about selecting top N items from the list  
> > in this case other than ordering them by user-user similarity?
> >
> > Of course, something is telling me I'm demonstrating that I don't  
> > yet have the full grasp of item-based filtering.  I hope that's the  
> > case! :)
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Otis
> 
> --------------------------
> Grant Ingersoll
> http://www.lucidimagination.com
> 
> Lucene Helpful Hints:
> http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/BasicsOfPerformance
> http://wiki.apache.org/lucene-java/LuceneFAQ

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