Evaluation of User Interests with a Cloud Model

The main problems to represent the qualitative concept of "interest" lie in not only fuzziness but also randomness. Cloud model is a model of the uncertain transition between qualitative concept and its quantitative representation. Cloud model can describe randomness and fuzziness in a unified way. This paper analyzes which of the observed user behaviors can be taken as a source of implicit feedback to capture user interests. This paper provides a model based cloud theory for analyzing the correlation between user behaviors and user interests. The experiment shows the benefits of effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of cloud model for expressing interests.