Probabilistic collaborative filtering with negative cross entropy

Abstract

Relevance-Based Language Models are an effective IR approach which explicitly introduces the concept of relevance in the statistical Language Modelling framework of Information Retrieval. These models have shown to achieve state-of-the-art retrieval performance in the pseudo relevance feedback task. In this paper we propose a novel adaptation of this language modeling approach to rating-based Collaborative Filtering. In a memory-based approach, we apply the model to the formation of user neighbourhoods, and the generation of recommendations based on such neighbourhoods. We report experimental results where our method outperforms other standard memory-based algorithms in terms of ranking precision.