Kernel-Mapping Recommender system algorithms

Recommender systems apply machine learning techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given item. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that we call the Kernel-Mapping Recommender (KMR), which uses a novel structure learning technique. This paper makes the following contributions: we show how (1) user-based and item-based versions of the KMR algorithm can be built; (2) user-based and item-based versions can be combined; (3) more information-features, genre, etc.-can be employed using kernels and how this affects the final results; and (4) to make reliable recommendations under sparse, cold-start, and long tail scenarios. By extensive experimental results on five different datasets, we show that the proposed algorithms outperform or give comparable results to other state-of-the-art algorithms. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.