xlvector – Recommender System

In recent years, many researches focus on increasing recommendation serendiptiy – how to make surprise recommendation. In my research, I find surprise recommendation is not enough, we must give reasonable explanations. This is because users need explanation to make sure your recommendation is relavant to them.

In real life, we always give detail explaination when we give special recommendation. For example, when a student working on data mining ask you to recommend some books for him. If I recommenda a datamining book to him, I only need to give short explanation, such as “this is the best book in datamining”. However, if I recommend a math book to him, he may surprise. This time, I need to give more detail explanation, such as “if you want to do good job in datamining, you must have good math foundation”. If I do not give explanation, this student may not read the math book I recommend. So, reasonable explanation is very important for surprise recommendation.

We are working hard to increase recommendation serendipity to help users find many items they do not know but may prefer potentially. Increasing serendipity always make CTR down. I think, this is because we do not make reasonable explanation. If a user only see the name of the item we think he may like, she may be surprise but she may not click the item because she do not know what is it.

So, if we want to make surprise recommendation for users, we must give the explanation at the same time. There are many reasons, such as:

1. this is the best book for your age
2. this movie is directed by XXX who is the director of XXX you watch before
3. Females living in zhongguancun always go to this shop
4. ………………………….

In real life, we give explanation when we recommend our friends to do something, in Internet, we also need to give explanation, especially for recommendation which may make users surprise.