A new approach to evaluating novel recommendations

Abstract

This paper presents two methods, named Item- and User-centric, to evaluate the quality of novel recommendations. The former method focuses on analyzing the item-based recommendation network. The aim is to detect whether the network topology has any pathology that hinders novel recommendations. The latter, user-centric evaluation, aims at measuring users' perceived quality of novel, previously unknown, recommendations.The results of the experiments, done in the music recommendation context, show that last.fm social recommender, based on collaborative filtering, is prone to popularity bias. This has direct consequences on the topology of the item-based recommendation network. Pure audio content-based methods (CB) are not affected by popularity. However, a user-centric experiment done with 288 subjects shows that even though a social-based approach recommends less novel items than our CB, users' perceived quality is better than those recommended by a pure CB method.