System and method for item recommendations

• US 20020178057A1
• Filed: 12/05/2001
• Published: 11/28/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 05/10/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Kyndryl Incorporated (Kyndryl Holdings, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: Bertram, Ralf, Stamm-Wilbrandt, Hermann, Schrimpf, Gerhard
• Granted Patent: US 8,700,448 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/14
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/90324 using system suggestions
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0222 During e-commerce, i.e. online transactions
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0631 Item recommendations

Abstract

Means and a computerized method for recommending items such as books and audio compact disks. For each item, a user profile includes ratings provided by users of the system. Unlike present recommendation systems, the user profiles do not include pre-computed similarity factors measuring similarity between users. Rather, when an advisee requests a recommendation, similarity measures are computed comparing the advisee to other users, and the similarity measures are associated with the other users. A subset of the users is selected, where the subset includes the users most similar to the advisee. A recommendation is made based on the ratings by the members of the selected subset.

Claims

1. A computerized method for generating a recommendation of an item to an advisee, comprising the steps of:

receiving a recommendation request from an advisee for a recommendation by a recommendation system;

in response to the recommendation request, computing a plurality of similarity factors that indicate similarity between the advisee and a plurality of users of the recommendation system who have previously provided ratings of a plurality of items;

selecting, from the plurality of users of the recommendation system, neighboring users to the advisee, according to the similarity factors;

generating a recommendation of at least one item of the plurality of items, according to the previously provided ratings of the plurality of items by the neighboring users.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the recommendation request includes a selected item list, and wherein all items upon which the step of computing depends are included in the selected item list.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the recommendation of at least one item includes only items that are included in the selected item list.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of selecting neighboring users excludes any user whose similarity with the advisee is below a predetermined threshold.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of step of computing and the step of selecting are executed substantially in parallel by inserting each newly computed similarity factor into a neighbor list in decreasing order of similarity and by limiting length of the neighbor list by excluding a user with lowest similarity if otherwise the neighbor list would exceed a predetermined length.

6. The method of claim 1, further including the step of caching identifiers of the neighboring users, associated similarity factors, and time stamps.

7. A user profile for a recommendation system, comprising a plurality of records, each record including a user identifier, an item identifier, and a rating value, wherein each record is linked in a first and a second dimension, the first dimension linking records with a same user identifier in a sequence according to the item identifier, and the second dimension linking records with a same item identifier in a sequence according to the user identifier.