Abstract
Collaborative filtering recommender systems often use nearest neighbor methods to identify candidate items. In this paper we present an inverted neighborhood model, k-Furthest Neighbors, to identify less ordinary neighborhoods for the purpose of creating more diverse recommendations. The approach is evaluated two-fold, once in a traditional information retrieval evaluation setting where the model is trained and validated on a split train/test set, and once through an online user study (N=132) to identify users’ perceived quality of the recommender. A standard k-nearest neighbor recommender is used as a baseline in both evaluation settings. Our evaluation shows that even though the proposed furthest neighbor model is outperformed in the traditional evaluation setting, the perceived usefulness of the algorithm shows no significant difference in the results of the user study.
