Relevancy Ranking of User Recommendations of Services Based on Browsing Patterns

Abstract

There are a number of inbound web services, which recommend content to users. However, there is no way for such services to prioritize their recommendations as per the users' interests. Here we are not interested in generating new recommendations, but rather organizing and prioritizing existing recommendations in order to increase the click rate. Since users have different patterns of browsing that also change frequently, it is good to have a system that prioritizes recommendations based on the current browsing patterns of individual users. In this paper we present such a system. We first generate the clusters of article topics using URLs from the users' browsing history, which is then used to generate the relevancy scores of the recommendation services based on entropy. The relevancy scores are then fed to the service providers, which use them to prioritize their recommendations by ranking them based on the relevancy scores. We test the model using the browsing history for 10 users, and validate the model by calculating the correlation of the generated relevancy scores with the users' manually provided topic preferences. We further use collaborative filtering to benchmark the usefulness of our ranking systems.