Application of Statistical Relational Learning to Hybrid Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems usually involve exploiting the relations among known features and content that describe items (content-based filtering) or the overlap of similar users who interacted with or rated the target item (collaborative filtering). To combine these two filtering approaches, current model-based hybrid recommendation systems typically require extensive feature engineering to construct a user profile. Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) provides a straightforward way to combine the two approaches. However, due to the large scale of the data used in real world recommendation systems, little research exists on applying SRL models to hybrid recommendation systems, and essentially none of that research has been applied on real big-data-scale systems. In this paper, we proposed a way to adapt the state-of-the-art in SRL learning approaches to construct a real hybrid recommendation system. Furthermore, in order to satisfy a common requirement in recommendation systems (i.e. that false positives are more undesirable and therefore penalized more harshly than false negatives), our approach can also allow tuning the tradeoff between the precision and recall of the system in a principled way. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed approach as well as its improved performance on recommendation precision.