Designing a Context Dependent Movie Recommender: A Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

In this thesis, we analyze a context-dependent movie recommendation system using a Hierarchical Bayesian Network. Unlike most other recommender systems which either do not consider context or do so using collaborative filtering, our approach is content-based. This allows users to individually interpret contexts or invent their own contexts and continue to get good recommendations. By using a Hierarchical Bayesian Network, we can provide context recommendations when users have only provided a small amount of information about their preferences per context. At the same time, our model has enough degrees of freedom to handle users with different preferences in different contexts. We show on a real data set that using a Bayesian Network to model contexts reduces the error on cross-validation over models that do not link contexts together or ignore context altogether.