Ranking and suggesting popular items

Milan Vojnovic, Richard James Randon Cruise, Dinan Gunawardena, Peter Marbach

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

31 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We consider the problem of ranking the popularity of items and suggesting popular items based on user feedback. User feedback is obtained by iteratively presenting a set of suggested items, and users selecting items based on their own preferences either from this suggestion set or from the set of all possible items. The goal is to quickly learn the true popularity ranking of items (unbiased by the made suggestions), and suggest true popular items. The difficulty is that making suggestions to users can reinforce popularity of some items and distort the resulting item ranking. The described problem of ranking and suggesting items arises in diverse applications including search query suggestions and tag suggestions for social tagging systems. We propose and study several algorithms for ranking and suggesting popular items, provide analytical results on their performance, and present numerical results obtained using the inferred popularity of tags from a month-long crawl of a popular social bookmarking service. Our results suggest that lightweight, randomized update rules that require no special configuration parameters provide good performance.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1133-1146
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Volume21
Issue number8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2009

Keywords

  • Popularity ranking
  • recommendation
  • suggestion
  • implicit user feedback
  • search query
  • social tagging
  • ALLOCATION RULES

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