Recommender systems are a branch of retrieval systems and information matching, which through identifying the interests and requires of the user, help the users achieve the desired information or service through a massive selection of choices. In recent years, the recommender systems apply describing information in the terms of the user, such as location, time, and task, in order to produce re...

In recent years, collaborative filtering (CF) methods are important and widely accepted techniques are available for recommender systems. One of these techniques is user based that produces useful recommendations based on the similarity by the ratings of likeminded users. However, these systems suffer from several inherent shortcomings such as data sparsity and cold start problems. With the dev...

This thesis consists of four parts: - An analysis of the core functions and the prerequisites for recommender systems in an industrial context: we identify four core functions for recommendation systems: Help do Decide, Help to Compare, Help to Explore, Help to Discover. The implementation of these functions has implications for the choices at the heart of algorithmic recommender systems. - A s...

With the rapid growth of the Internet and overwhelming amount of information that people are confronted with, recommender systems have been developed to effectively support users' decision-making process in online systems. So far, much attention has been paid to designing new recommendation algorithms and improving existent ones. However, few works considered the different contributions from di...

This thesis consists of three papers on recommender systems. The first paper addresses the problem of making decentralized recommendations using a peer-to-peer architecture. Collaborating recommender agents are connected into a network of neighbors that exchange user recommendations to find new items to recommend. We achieved a performance comparable to a centralized system. The second paper de...

“Position bias” describes the tendency of users to interact with items on top of a list with higher probability than with items at a lower position in the list, regardless of the items’ actual relevance. In the domain of recommender systems, particularly recommender systems in digital libraries, position bias has received little attention. We conduct a study in a real-world recommender system t...

Traditionally, recommender systems for the web deal with applications that have two dimensions, users and items. Based on access data that relate these dimensions, a recommendation model can be built and used to identify a set of N items that will be of interest to a certain user. In this paper we propose a multidimensional approach, called DaVI (Dimensions as Virtual Items), that consists in i...