Poster Papers

Estimating the Magic Barrier of Recommender Systems: A User Study

AutorAlan Said, Brijnesh Johannes Jain, Sascha Narr, Till Plumbaum, Sahin Albayrak, Christian Scheel
QuelleProceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '12) 
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Recommender systems are commonly evaluated by trying to predict known, withheld, ratings for a set of users. Measures such as the Root-Mean-Square Error are used to estimate the quality of the recommender algorithms. This process does however not acknowledge the inherent rating inconsistencies of users. In this paper we present the first results from a noise measurement user study for estimating the magic barrier of recommender systems conducted on a commercial movie recommendation community. The magic barrier is the expected squared error of the optimal recommendation algorithm, or, the lowest error we can expect from any recommendation algorithm. Our results show that the barrier can be estimated by collecting the opinions of users on already rated items.