Identifying Grey Sheep Users in Collaborative Filtering: a Distribution-Based Technique
Résumé
The collaborative filtering (CF) approach in recommender systems assumes
that users' preferences are consistent among users. Although accurate,
this approach fails on some users.
We presume that some of these users belong to a small community of
users who have unusual preferences, such users are not compliant with the CF
underlying assumption. They are {\it grey sheep users}. This paper aims at accurately identifying grey sheep users.
We introduce a new distribution-based grey sheep users identification
technique, that borrows from outlier detection and from information
retrieval, while taking into account the specificities of preference
data on which CF relies: extreme sparsity, imprecision and users' bias.
The experimental evaluation conducted on a state-of-the-art dataset
shows that this new distribution-based technique outperforms state-of-the-art grey sheep users identification techniques.