Is there any precedent for treating users' demographic characteristics as items (particularly for item-based recommendation)? For example, if one were performing item-based recommendation within a bookselling site, it'd be natural to include the user:item purchases as boolean preferences. But could it also make sense to include certain user:demographic pairs as boolean preferences (e.g. user123:age40-to-50)? Of course, these items would need to be filtered (by a Rescorer) in the recommendation outputs, but I'm curious whether including them as inputs is potentially helpful.
Thanks, Jamey
