Many recommendation algorithms suffer from popularity bias: a small number of popular items being recommended too frequently, while other items get insufficient exposure. Research in this area so far has concentrated on a one-shot representation of this bias, and on algorithms to improve the diversity of individual recommendation lists. In this work, we take a time-sensitive view of popularity bias, in which the algorithm assesses its long-tail coverage at regular intervals, and compensates in the present moment for omissions in the past. In particular, we present a temporal version of the well-known xQuAD diversification algorithm adapted for long-tail recommendation. Experimental results on two public datasets show that our method is more effective in terms of the long-tail coverage and accuracy tradeoff compared to some other existing approaches.
A regularization-based approach to improving long tail recommendations is found in @cite_2 . One limitation with that work is that it is restricted to factorization models where the long-tail preference can be encoded in terms of the latent factors. This algorithm does not account for differential user tolerance towards long-tail items. A re-ranking approach can be applied to any algorithm, and in our implementation, we also take personalization of long-tail promotion into account.
@cite_2
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Many recommendation algorithms suffer from popularity bias in their output: popular items are recommended frequently and less popular ones rarely, if at all. However, less popular, long-tail items are precisely those that are often desirable recommendations. In this paper, we introduce a flexible regularization-based framework to enhance the long-tail coverage of recommendation lists in a learning-to-rank algorithm. We show that regularization provides a tunable mechanism for controlling the trade-off between accuracy and coverage. Moreover, the experimental results using two data sets show that it is possible to improve coverage of long tail items without substantial loss of ranking performance. The success of "infinite-inventory" retailers such as Amazon.com and Netflix has been largely attributed to a "long tail" phenomenon. Although the majority of their inventory is not in high demand, these niche products, unavailable at limited-inventory competitors, generate a significant fraction of total revenue in aggregate. In addition, tail product availability can boost head sales by offering consumers the convenience of "one-stop shopping" for both their mainstream and niche tastes. However, most of existing recommender systems, especially collaborative filter based methods, can not recommend tail products due to the data sparsity issue. It has been widely acknowledged that to recommend popular products is easier yet more trivial while to recommend long tail products adds more novelty yet it is also a more challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel suite of graph-based algorithms for the long tail recommendation. We first represent user-item information with undirected edge-weighted graph and investigate the theoretical foundation of applying Hitting Time algorithm for long tail item recommendation. To improve recommendation diversity and accuracy, we extend Hitting Time and propose efficient Absorbing Time algorithm to help users find their favorite long tail items. Finally, we refine the Absorbing Time algorithm and propose two entropy-biased Absorbing Cost algorithms to distinguish the variation on different user-item rating pairs, which further enhances the effectiveness of long tail recommendation. Empirical experiments on two real life datasets show that our proposed algorithms are effective to recommend long tail items and outperform state-of-the-art recommendation techniques. The paper studies the Long Tail problem of recommender systems when many items in the Long Tail have only few ratings, thus making it hard to use them in recommender systems. The approach presented in the paper splits the whole itemset into the head and the tail parts and clusters only the tail items. Then recommendations for the tail items are based on the ratings in these clusters and for the head items on the ratings of individual items. If such partition and clustering are done properly, we show that this reduces the recommendation error rates for the tail items, while maintaining reasonable computational performance. Tagging plays an important role in many recent websites. Recommender systems can help to suggest a user the tags he might want to use for tagging a specific item. Factorization models based on the Tucker Decomposition (TD) model have been shown to provide high quality tag recommendations outperforming other approaches like PageRank, FolkRank, collaborative filtering, etc. The problem with TD models is the cubic core tensor resulting in a cubic runtime in the factorization dimension for prediction and learning. In this paper, we present the factorization model PITF (Pairwise Interaction Tensor Factorization) which is a special case of the TD model with linear runtime both for learning and prediction. PITF explicitly models the pairwise interactions between users, items and tags. The model is learned with an adaption of the Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR) criterion which originally has been introduced for item recommendation. Empirically, we show on real world datasets that this model outperforms TD largely in runtime and even can achieve better prediction quality. Besides our lab experiments, PITF has also won the ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge 2009 for graph-based tag recommendation.