IMACST: VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1 MAY 2013 15
Recommendation Diversity for Web
Personalization: A Survey
Chetan B. Patil and R. B. Wagh
Abstract— Today the tremendous information overload is a big
concern in information retrieval field. Most of the time user get
confused and often get lost while surfing on the web.
Recommender systems that do the job of web personalization
customize the web sites and recommend the web products by
understanding the user needs. The recommender systems are
intelligent one as they do not explicitly ask to users about their
interests every time. Currently recommender systems focus on
accuracy of systems to improve the quality. But diversity of
recommendation list is also an important factor that brings web
personalization in true sense. We explore here overview of
different techniques to improve diversity while maintaining
adequate level of accuracy. We observed some are content-based
and some are collaborative techniques. We insist researchers to
propose hybrid techniques that can take advantage of
contentbased techniques as well as collaborative techniques to
enhance the diversity. In addition one should also look for
enhancing both individual as well as aggregate diversity
simultaneously. We believe comparative analysis among
performances of such techniques can justify the quality
enhancement.
Index Terms— information retrieval, accuracy, diversity
I. INTRODUCTION
I NFORMATION retrieval is a system that retrieves
information from web resources on behalf of user requests.
User type something on search engine and the requested query
is resolved according to some relevance and ranking
algorithms on server end to reply the requested information of
that user. The fact that user has to enter his query explicitly has
itself became serious problem with information retrieval
systems. This is because today tremendous information is
available on web out of which user may be unaware about
most of it.
User will request only for that information that he or she had
heard before this. Other existing information in which user
may find interest never comes to the user screen because IR
returns only relevant information. But unfortunately IR can’t
understand user’s interests intelligently and hence lots of
useful information remains behind the scene. Another crucial
point is that though we accept IR in its current form; user has
Chetan B. Patil, PG Student, Computer Engineering Department, R. C.
Patel Institute of Technology, Shirpur, affiliated to North Maharashtra
University (NMU), Maharashtra, India. email: chetan.rcpit@gmail.com R. B.
Wagh, Associate Professor, Computer Engineering Department, R. C. Patel
Institute of Technology, Shirpur, affiliated to North Maharashtra University
(NMU), Maharashtra, India. email: raj_wagh@rediffmail.com
1857-7202/1305072
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to enter exact and specific query that represents his or her
interest. Otherwise IR may come with large set of generalized
results and expected result may be displayed somewhere at the
later pages of results which is more cumbersome. Instead of
this what if users do not have to enter any query at all and
someone intelligently recommend customized information for
user. Well web personalization is the area where all such care
is taken about users and their likes-dislikes.
Web Personalization is a technique that customizes a
website in accordance of user’s interests and likes-dislikes.
Web personalization does not need any explicit data instead it
collects web data in web context which can be structural,
content or user profile data. Web Personalization guides the
users to achieve better web experience. Web experience can be
simply browsing of a web site or it can be as important as
purchasing some products or downloading some items from
that web site. And this experience can be enhanced by
rearranging the web site content or structure, highlighting web
links, insertion of some runtime links or creation of new
windows or pages. Uses of proper web mining techniques that
are intelligent and computationally efficient are required.
Accurate utilization of such techniques will lead to web
personalization in true sense. In addition lots of problems
associated with web personalization also need to be addressed
simultaneously. They are cold-start problem, scalability,
adapting to user context, managing dynamics in user interests,
robustness, information security.
Recommender system is a simulation of Web
Personalization. Recommender system is a special kind of
personalized information retrieval system that retrieves or say
recommends products/items in accordance of user’s interests
and likes-dislikes but without explicit requests from users.
They are also seen as internet-based software tools, designed
to help users find their way through today’s complex online
shops and entertainment websites. Recommender engine is an
important part for any such commercial website today. The
implicit data obtained from intelligent mining techniques is the
input for recommender engine and the algorithm implemented
inside do the rating predictions and ranking of information to
be recommended. One way to classify recommender systems
as content based type, collaborative type and hybrid type
[2][3][10]. Another way is heuristic based type and model
based type recommender systems.
Lots of different factors are important in deciding the
quality of a recommender system. These factors are seen as
more or
16 C.B. Patil and R. B. Wagh: Recommendation Diversity for Web Personalization: A Survey
less important depending on the application where you are
going to use the recommender system. As stated earlier
recommender system is simulation of web personalization so
improvements in problems of web personalization will
improve the quality of recommender system also. Some of
factors are accuracy, diversity, scalability, reliability,
serendipity etc.
Accuracy is the property of recommender system that
decides whether generated recommendations are accurately
identified to user’s interests and likes-dislikes or not. If user is
receiving what he or she is expecting then the accuracy of your
recommender system is high.
Diversity is the property of recommender system that forces
to recommend various different items as possible. Many it so
happens that user get bored if received recommendations are
all of same type and in this situation if he or she found items
that stands out differently among other items he or she may go
for that outstanding member. Basic reason behind this is the
human mind set which is easily attracted to odd figure in
search of something new than regular routine.
Diversity can be inherent or perceived [12]. Inherent
diversity decides the recommendations based on dissimilarity
among items to be recommended. It can be further classified as
individual or aggregate diversity. Individual diversity means
dissimilarity among items recommended to a single individual
user. Aggregate diversity means dissimilarity among items
being recommended across all users under considerations.
Perceived diversity decides the recommendations based on
actual experience by users regarding the differentness among
items being recommended. It can be again classified as current
perceived diversity or temporal perceived diversity. Current
perceived diversity considers experience of a user at a point of
time. Temporal perceived diversity considers the user
experience over a period of time.
The survey encompasses a thorough description of both
content based and collaborative techniques for representing
items and user profiles. Then we discussed about various
efforts by researchers in individual as well as aggregate
diversity. Finally, it discusses trends and future research which
might lead towards the next generation of recommender
systems.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
A. Individual diversity
B. Smyth et. al. [1] proposed some ad-hoc strategies to
rank items for inclusion in recommendation list. According
to author maximum similarity in target query and cases to be
retrieved is the general strategy in many domains but it
doesn’t work in some domains.
K. Bradley et. al. [2] proposed three new algorithms for
improving individual diversity. According to author diversity
problem is always been limitation for content based
recommendation techniques and the proposed algorithms have
formed a benchmark on this concern. Out of these Bounded
Greedy Selection algorithm has greatly reduced the retrieval
cost and caused minimal loss of similarity among target query
and recommendations.
C. Ziegler et. al. [3] proposed topic diversification, a
new heuristic approach to optimize the balance between
accuracy and diversity so as to keep accuracy in a certain level
when increasing diversity, specifically for recommendation
lists obtained as a result of some item based collaborative
filtering algorithm. Topic diversification resembles to Osmotic
Pressure analogy where selective permeability is the key
criteria for optimization. Taxonomies are created for various
domains, arranged in a hierarchical way. Each product belongs
to one or more taxonomies and they also have content
descriptions relating to these domain taxonomies. The authors
also propose intra-list similarity, a new metric which is well
suited to capture the diversity using proposed algorithm.
According to authors effective use of content descriptions
along with relevance weights of products has effective impact
while ranking items and that is where the proposed method
differs from other existing ones. Their experimental results
shown that users preferred the altered diversified list even
some loss of accuracy occurred, than the accurate unaltered
list.
D. Fleder et. al. [4] showed how basic design choices
a_ect the outcome, and thus managers can choose
recommender designs that are more consistent with their sales
goals and consumers' preferences. They found that
recommenders can increase sales, and recommenders that
discount popularity appropriately may increase sales more.
M. Zhang et. al. [5] proposed a approach that seeks to find
out best possible subset of items to be recommended over all
possible subsets. Here resultant list’s similarity to target query
and diversity within list these two are taken as a binary
optimization problem. A new evaluation metrics, item novelty,
is proposed. Item novelty means how much an item is different
than existing items list. Item novelty depends upon other
existing items in user profile. Item novelty brings certain level
of difficulty for recommendations and hence can be used to
generate useful test cases. By adjusting the novelty value the
tolerance in accuracy loss is balanced. Author points out that
probability of recommending novel items is low whenever
similarity is the basic selection criterion.
P. Castells et. al. [6] proposed that though various novelty
and diversity metrics are popular in literature of recommender
systems, they do not address two important characteristics item
ranking and relevance. Author concentrated on two ground
concepts, namely item similarity and user-item interaction.
User-item interaction is modeled based on three conditions
choice, discovery and relevance. They tried to cover and
generalize the old metrics and put in better format.
S. Vergas et. al. [7] proposed that intent oriented information
retrieval diversity can be applied improving Recommendation
diversity. They formalized the diversity and novelty metrics
and their results showed that resulting diversification
techniques can give best results. In addition these proposed
metrics are well aware of ranking and relevance issues pointed
out in [6].
IMACST: VOLUME 4 NUMBER 1 MAY 2013
A. Said et. al. [8] proposed an approach that is completely
orthogonal to the standard k nearest neighbor (kNN)
algorithms followed in traditional recommender systems. The
variant they proposed is k furthest neighbors (kFN) algorithm
that uses an augmented inverted similarity measure. The least
liked items of neighborhoods are recommended. Their results
on standard datasets have shown that diversity is improved
with insignificant loss in recommendation accuracy.
A. Aggregate Diversity
T. Zhou et. al. [9] developed an approach that combines a
accuracy focused algorithm and a diversity focused algorithm.
According to author such collaborations can yield best results
balancing both accuracy and diversity, without relying on any
semantic or context specific information. They used averaging
process in their algorithm that supports diversity
enhancements.
G. Adomavicius et. al. [10] designed some ranking based
techniques that can improve aggregate diversity of
recommendation lists across all users. They conducted online
experiments on MoviLense, Netix and YahooMovies datasets,
each operated by different rating prediction techniques in
combination with the proposed seven different ranking based
techniques. For item based popularity ranking approach they
formed a parameterized function through which the level of
accuracy and diversity to be maintained is controlled. They
proposed precision-in-top-N, a metric to measure the accuracy
of the recommendation list and diversity-in-top-N, a metric to
measure the aggregate diversity of recommendation list. The
analysis shows that popularity of items can be a good tool to
enhance the diversity and hence lead to user satisfaction.
C. Other Related Work
K. Alodhaibi et. al. [11] built a recommender algorithm that
works for compound products and services instead of just
individual items. For this they implemented CARD framework
which basically separates the utility space and diversity space
to avoid the tradeoff between similarity and diversity. The
algorithm he designed is computationally efficient and
outperforms in terms of diversity.
M. Ge et. al. [12] proposed an approach where position of
items in recommendation list has given most importance.
Authors said that though diversity weather individual or
aggregate is achieved, it is not necessary that user will perceive
its advantages. A well diversifies list may display the similar
items at the top of the list and diverse items may be at bottom
which is not desirable always. Especially it is highly important
in case of small screen devices where user is interested in only
top few recommendations.
B. Wang et. al. [13] said that user's interests are always full
of uncertainty which could not be addressed by top-N list of
recommendations easily. Instead of this author proposed a
cloud model which is powerful at solving knowledge
uncertainties.
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III. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
The web personalization systems are really useful today as
they have ability to understand the user's needs explicitly as
well as implicitly. Though it has several issues of concerns still
well balanced systems have already captured the market.
Quality improvement can be achieved not only by accuracy but
also by diversity gains. This will bring personalization in true
sense. Though the concept is very clear actual balance
maintained among accuracy and diversity is challenging. Use
of proper re-ranking technique and proper measurement metric
will improve the system. The division into rating prediction
and re-ranking has brought flexibility in implementation of
various state of the art techniques.
Such quality systems which balance not only the accuracy
but also the diversity can be made optimized using any well-
known optimization algorithm. Genetic algorithm or Particle
swarm optimizations are well known optimization techniques
that can significantly enhance the efficiency of the system.
Instead of increasing diversity of individual items we can
think of the diversity improvement of the some sequence of
items or say bundle of items also. Now as multiple items are
involved in a bundle so we have to think about the aggregate
characteristics of all items or services. Proposed system can be
extended in this direction also.
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[3] C.-N. Ziegler, S. McNee, J. Konstan, and G. Lausen, ”Improving
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[4] D. Fleder and K. Hosanagar,”Blockbuster culture's next rise or fall: The
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18 C.B. Patil and R. B. Wagh: Recommendation Diversity for Web Personalization: A Survey

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