We propose a new hybrid recommender system that combines some advantages of collaborative and content-based recommender systems. While it uses ratings data of all users, as do collaborative recommender systems, it is also able to recommend new items and provide an explanation of its recommendations, as do content-based systems. Our approach is based on the idea that there are communities of users that find the same characteristics important to like or dislike a product. This model is an extension of the probabilistic latent semantic model for collaborative filtering with ideas based on clusterwise linear regression. On a movie data set, we show that the model is competitive to other recommenders and can be used to explain the recommendations to the users.

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Erasmus Research Institute of Management
hdl.handle.net/1765/13180
ERIM Report Series Research in Management
ERIM report series research in management Erasmus Research Institute of Management
Erasmus Research Institute of Management

Kagie, M., van der Loos, M., & van Wezel, M. (2008). Including Item Characteristics in the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis Model for Collaborative Filtering (No. ERS-2008-053-MKT). ERIM report series research in management Erasmus Research Institute of Management. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/1765/13180