A Hidden Markov Model for Collaborative Filtering

Management Information Systems Quarterly, Forthcoming

33 Pages Posted: 31 Oct 2010 Last revised: 13 Aug 2012

See all articles by Nachiketa Sahoo

Nachiketa Sahoo

Boston University - Questrom School of Business

Param Vir Singh

Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business

Tridas Mukhopadhyay

Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business

Date Written: October 15, 2010

Abstract

We present a hidden Markov model for collaborative filtering of implicit ratings when the ratings have been generated by a set of changing user preferences. Most of the works in the collaborative filtering and recommender systems literature have been developed under the assumption that user preference is a static pattern. However, we show by analyzing a dataset on employees’ blog reading behaviors that users’ reading behaviors do change over time. We model the unobserved user preference as a Hidden Markov sequence. The observation that users read variable numbers of blog articles in each time period and choose different types of articles to read, requires a novel observation model. We use a Negative Binomial mixture of Multinomials to model such observations. This allows us to identify stable global preferences of users towards the items in the dataset and allows us to track the users through these preferences. We compare the algorithm with a number of static algorithms and a recently proposed dynamic collaborative filtering algorithm and find that the proposed HMM based collaborative filter outperforms the other algorithms.

Keywords: Recommender Systems, Collaborative Filtering, HMM, Implicit Rating

Suggested Citation

Sahoo, Nachiketa and Singh, Param Vir and Mukhopadhyay, Tridas, A Hidden Markov Model for Collaborative Filtering (October 15, 2010). Management Information Systems Quarterly, Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1700585 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1700585

Nachiketa Sahoo (Contact Author)

Boston University - Questrom School of Business ( email )

595 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA MA 02215
United States

HOME PAGE: http://people.bu.edu/nachi/

Param Vir Singh

Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business ( email )

5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
United States
412-268-3585 (Phone)

Tridas Mukhopadhyay

Carnegie Mellon University - David A. Tepper School of Business ( email )

5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
United States
412-268-2307 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://web.gsia.cmu.edu/display_faculty.aspx?id=102

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