An iterative semi-explicit rating method for building collaborative recommender systems

Collaborative filtering plays the key role in recent recommender systems. It uses a user-item preference matrix rated either explicitly (i.e., explicit rating) or implicitly (i.e., implicit feedback). Despite the explicit rating captures the preferences better, it often results in a severely sparse matrix. The paper presents a novel iterative semi-explicit rating method that extrapolates unrated elements in a semi-supervised manner. Extrapolation is simply an aggregation of neighbor ratings, and iterative extrapolations result in a dense preference matrix. Preliminary simulation results show that the recommendation using the semi-explicit rating data outperforms that of using the pure explicit data only.