Improve the “Long Tail" Recommendation through Popularity-Sensitive Clustering Huaiyi Huang, Ying Zhao, Jiabao Yan, Lei Yang Department of Computer Science and Technology / Department of Software Engineering Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China {huanghy11, yanjb11, yanglei11}@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
[email protected] ABSTRACT popular items for the lack of information. Several recom- Collaborative filtering(CF) is one of the most successful ap- mendation methods were proposed in the literature with proaches to build recommender system. In recommender the aim of improving the \long tail" recommendation per- system, \long tail" items are considered to be particularly formance [10, 21, 13, 14, 22]. They are either specific rec- valuable. Many clustering algorithms based on CF designed ommendation methods targeting only \long tail" items [10, only to tackle the \long tail" items, while others trade off 21, 22], or comprehensive ones trading-off between overall the overall recommendation accuracy and \long tail" perfor- recommendation accuracy and \long tail" performance [13, mance. Our approach is based on utilizing the item popular- 14]. ity information. We demonstrate that \long tail" recommen- dation can be inferred precisely by balanced item popularity We propose to tackle this problem from a clustering perspec- of each cluster. We propose a novel popularity-sensitive clus- tive. In addition to reaching the common goals of clustering, tering method. In terms of \long tail" and overall accuracy, such as grouping users with similar behaviors or to increase our method outperforms previous ones via experiments on the density of the user-item matrix for each cluster, our clus- MovieLens, citeUlike, and MobileApp.