Context-aware rank-oriented recommender systems

Recommender systems are a type of information filtering system that suggests items that may be of interest to a user. Most information retrieval systems have an overwhelmingly large number of entries. Most users would experience information overload if they were forced to explore the full set of results. The goal of recommender systems is to overcome this limitation by predicting how users will value certain items and returning the items that should be of the highest interest to the user. Most recommender systems collect explicit user feedback, such as a rating, and attempt to optimize their model to this rating value. However, there is potential for a system to collect implicit user feedback, such as user purchases and clicks, to learn user preferences. Additionally with implicit user feedback, it is possible for the system to remember the context of user feedback in terms of which other items a user was considering when making their decisions. When considering implicit user feedback, only a subset of all evaluation techniques can be used. Currently, sufficient evaluation techniques for evaluating implicit user feedback do not exist. In this thesis, I introduce a new model for recommendation that borrows the idea of opportunity cost from economics. There are two variations of the model, one considering context and one that does not. Additionally, I propose a new evaluation measure that works specifically for the case of implicit user feedback.