Extended latent class models for collaborative recommendation

With the advent of the World Wide Web, providing just-in-time personalized product recommendations to customers now becomes possible. Collaborative recommender systems utilize correlation between customer preference ratings to identify "like-minded" customers and predict their product preference. One factor determining the success of the recommender systems is the prediction accuracy, which in many cases is limited by lacking adequate ratings (the sparsity problem). Recently, the use of latent class model (LCM) has been proposed to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we first study how the LCM can be extended to handle customers and products outside the training set. In addition, we propose the use of a pair of LCMs (called dual latent class model-DLCM), instead of a single LCM, to model customers' likes and dislikes separately for enhancing the prediction accuracy. Experimental results based on the EachMovie dataset show that DLCM outperforms both LCM and the conventional correlation-based method when the available ratings are sparse.