A User-and Item-Aware Weighting Scheme for Combining Predictive User Models

Hybridising user models can improve predictive accuracy. However, research on linearly combining predictive user models (e.g., used in recommender systems) has often made the implicit assumption that the individual models perform uniformly across the user and item space, using static model weights when computing a weighted average of the predictions of the individual models. This paper proposes a weighting scheme which combines user- and item-specific weight vectors to compute user- and item-aware model weights. The proposed hybridisation approach adaptively estimates online the model parameters that are specific to a target user as information about this user becomes available. Hence, it is particularly well-suited for domains where little or no information regarding the target user’s preferences or interests is available at the time of offline model training. The proposed weighting scheme is evaluated by applying it to a real-world scenario from the museum domain. Our results show that in our domain, our hybridisation approach attains a higher predictive accuracy than the individual component models. Additionally, our approach outperforms a non-adaptive hybrid model that uses static model weights.