16 June 10:00 Fabian Bohnert: Spatial Processes for Recommender Systems

Fabian Bohnert is visiting HIIT from Monash University (Melbourne,
Australia) week 25. Fabian is a PhD candidate there, see http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~fabianb/. He gives a guest talk on Tue 16 June at 10 in C222.

Title:
Spatial Processes for Recommender Systems

Abstract:
Spatial processes are typically used to analyse and predict geographic data. In this talk, we adapt such models to the task of predicting a user's interests or item ratings within recommender systems. We present the theoretical framework for a model based on Gaussian spatial processes, and discuss efficient algorithms for parameter estimation. In the second part of the talk, we present a real-world application scenario for our model: predicting a museum visitor's interests in exhibits. We discuss our results from an evaluation with a real-world dataset of time spans spent by museum visitors at exhibits (viewed as implicit ratings). In this application scenario, our model achieves a higher predictive accuracy than nearest-neighbour collaborative filters.


Last updated on 3 Jun 2009 by Visa Noronen - Page created on 16 Jun 2009 by Visa Noronen