Towards decentralized recommender systems

Automated recommender systems make product suggestions that are tailored <br>to the human user's individual needs and represent powerful means to combat <br>information glut. However, their practical applicability has been largely confined to scenarios where all information relevant for recommendation making <br>is kept in one single, authoritative node. <br> <br>Recently, novel distributed infrastructures are emerging, e.g., peer-to-peer and <br>ad-hoc networks, the Semantic Web, the Grid, etc., and supersede classical <br>client/server approaches in many respects. These infrastructures could likewise <br>benefit from recommender system services, leading to a paradigm shift <br>towards decentralized recommender systems. <br> <br>In this thesis, we investigate the challenges that decentralized recommender <br>systems bring up and propose diverse techniques in order to cope with those <br>particular issues. The spectrum of methods proposed ranges from the employment <br>of product classification taxonomies as powerful background knowledge, <br>alleviating the sparsity problem, to trust propagation mechanisms designed <br>to address the scalability issue. Empirical investigations on the correlation of <br>interpersonal trust and interest similarity provide the component glue that <br>melds these results together and renders the eventual creation of a decentralized recommender framework feasible. <br> <br>While these building bricks, namely taxonomy-driven filtering, topic diversification, and the Appleseed trust metric, are vital for the conception of our trust-based decentralized recommender, they are also valuable contributions <br>in their own right, addressing issues not only confined to the universe of decentralized recommender systems.

Author dc:creator

• Ziegler, Cai-Nicolas

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lausen, Georg

• Recommender Systems
• Information Filtering
• Trust Models
• Statistics

Repository record source_url

https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/1804

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:freidok.uni-freiburg.de:1804