Accelerated Learning of User Profiles

Pelin Atahan () and Sumit Sarkar ()
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Pelin Atahan: School of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Özye\u{g}in University, Istanbul, Turkey 34662
Sumit Sarkar: School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 75080

Management Science, 2011, vol. 57, issue 2, 215-239

Abstract: Websites typically provide several links on each page visited by a user. Whereas some of these links help users easily navigate the site, others are typically used to provide targeted recommendations based on the available user profile. When the user profile is not available (or is inadequate), the site cannot effectively target products, promotions, and advertisements. In those situations, the site can learn the profile of a user as the user traverses the site. Naturally, the faster the site can learn a user's profile, the sooner the site can benefit from personalization. We develop a technique that sites can use to learn the profile as quickly as possible. The technique identifies links for sites to make available that will lead to a more informative profile when the user chooses one of the offered links. Experiments conducted using our approach demonstrate that it enables learning the profiles markedly better after very few user interactions as compared to benchmark approaches. The approach effectively learns multiple attributes simultaneously, can learn well classes that have highly skewed priors, and remains quite effective even when the distribution of link profiles at a site is relatively homogeneous. The approach works particularly well when a user's traversal is influenced by the most recently visited pages on a site. Finally, we show that the approach is robust to noise in the estimates for the probability parameters needed for its implementation. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.

Keywords: personalization; Bayesian learning; information theory; recommendation systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:57:y:2011:i:2:p:215-239

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