Predicting the performance of recommender systems: An information theoretic approach

Abstract

Performance prediction is an appealing problem in Recommender Systems, as it enables an array of strategies for deciding when to deliver or hold back recommendations based on their foreseen accuracy. The problem, however, has been barely addressed explicitly in the area. In this paper, we propose adaptations of query clarity techniques from ad-hoc Information Retrieval to define performance predictors in the context of Recommender Systems, which we refer to as user clarity. Our experiments show positive results with different user clarity models in terms of the correlation with single recommender's performance. Empiric results show significant dependency between this correlation and the recommendation method at hand, as well as competitive results in terms of average correlation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.