Physica A 392 (2013) 3417–3423
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Physica A
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/physa
Preference of online users and personalized
recommendations
Yuan Guan
a
, Dandan Zhao
a
, An Zeng
b,c,∗
, Ming-Sheng Shang
a,c,∗∗
a
Web Science Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, PR China
b
Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Musée 3, CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland
c
Institute of Information Economy, Alibaba Business School, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 310036, PR China
h i g h l i g h t s
• We apply the hybrid recommendation method at individual level.
• Each user has his own personalized hybrid parameter to adjust.
• Users are found to be quite different in the optimal personalized hybrid parameters.
• We propose a strategy to assign users with suitable personalized parameters.
• The recommendation performance can be significantly improved.
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 14 November 2012
Received in revised form 27 January 2013
Available online 10 April 2013
Keywords:
Hybrid algorithm
Recommender system
Personalized parameter
User heterogeneity
a b s t r a c t
In a recent work [T. Zhou, Z. Kuscsik, J.-G. Liu, M. Medo, J.R. Wakeling, Y.-C. Zhang, Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. 107 (2010) 4511], a personalized recommendation algorithm with high
performance in both accuracy and diversity is proposed. This method is based on the
hybridization of two single algorithms called probability spreading and heat conduction,
which respectively are inclined to recommend popular and unpopular products. With a
tunable parameter, an optimal balance between these two algorithms in system level is
obtained. In this paper, we apply this hybrid method in individual level, namely each user
has his/her own personalized hybrid parameter to adjust. Interestingly, we find that users are
quite different in personalized hybrid parameters and the recommendation performance
can be significantly improved if each user is assigned with his/her optimal personalized
hybrid parameter. Furthermore, we find that users’ personalized parameters are negatively
correlated with users’ degree but positively correlated with the average degree of the
items collected by each user. With these understandings, we propose a strategy to assign
users with suitable personalized parameters, which leads to a further improvement of the
original hybrid method. Finally, our work highlights the importance of considering the
heterogeneity of users in recommendation.
© 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.
1. Introduction
The last few years have witnessed serious problems of information explosion. The amount of information, especially on
the internet, is increasing far more quickly than our ability to process it. For instance, there are thousands of movies, millions
of books and billions of web pages. The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet resource greatly increases the necessity of
∗
Corresponding author. Tel.: +41 026 3009275.
∗∗
Corresponding author at: Web Science Center, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, PR China.
E-mail addresses: an.zeng@unifr.ch (A. Zeng), Shang.mingsheng@gmail.com (M.-S. Shang).
0378-4371/$ – see front matter © 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2013.03.045