1. A method for predicting a person's preference for an item, comprising, by one or more processors: receiving, via an electronic device, identifying information about an item of interest; accessing a user profile for a person; accessing a database of characteristic values for a plurality of candidate items; using the identifying information to identify a candidate item that corresponds to the item of interest and retrieve one or more characteristics of the identified candidate item; processing the retrieved characteristics with the user profile to generate a predicted rating for the item of interest for the person; and causing the electronic device to output the predicted rating to the person.