Factor in the neighbors

Recommender systems provide users with personalized suggestions for products or services. These systems often rely on collaborating filtering (CF), where past transactions are analyzed in order to establish connections between users and products. The most common approach to CF is based on neighborhood models, which originate from similarities between products or users. In this work we introduce a new neighborhood model with an improved prediction accuracy. Unlike previous approaches that are based on heuristic similarities, we model neighborhood relations by minimizing a global cost function. Further accuracy improvements are achieved by extending the model to exploit both explicit and implicit feedback by the…