Active learning for aspect model in recommender systems

Recommender systems help Web users to address information overload. Their performance, however, depends on the amount of information that users provide about their preferences. Users are not willing to provide information for a large amount of items, thus the quality of recommendations is affected specially for new users. Active learning has been proposed in the past, to acquire preference information from users. Based on an underlying prediction model, these approaches determine the most informative item for querying the new user to provide a rating. In this paper, we propose a new active learning method which is developed specially based on aspect model features. There is a difference between classic active learning and active learning for recommender system. In the recommender system context, each item has already been rated by training users while in classic active learning there is not training user. We take into account this difference and develop a new method which competes with a complicated bayesian approach in accuracy while results in drastically reduced (one order of magnitude) user waiting times, i.e., the time that the users wait before being asked a new query.