PROPOSING OBJECTS TO A USER TO EFFICIENTLY DISCOVER DEMOGRAPHICS FROM ITEM RATINGS

• Main Authors: BHAGAT SMRITI, IOANNIDIS STRATIS, WEINSBERG UDI
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 26.11.2015
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTER SYSTEMS BASED ON SPECIFIC COMPUTATIONAL MODELS; COMPUTING; COUNTING; DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS OR METHODS, SPECIALLY ADAPTED FORADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORYOR FORECASTING PURPOSES; PHYSICS; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE,COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORY OR FORECASTINGPURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR

The current methods and apparatus provide a system that learns a private attribute, such as gender, based on at least one iteration of presenting an item to a user and receiving ratings from the user for this item. In an exemplary embodiment, the system may solicit ratings for strategically selected items, such as movies for example, and then infers the user's gender. Based on the assessed confidence in the demographic selected, the system may repeat the selection, presentation and ratings of another item. The proposed system can strategically select the sequence of items that are presented to the user for a rating. By selecting the next item to be rated based on a maximum posterior probability confidence, a demographic with a certain threshold of confidence can be inferred. The inventive arrangements are based on novel usage of Bayesian matrix factorization in an active learning setting. Such a system is shown to be feasible and can be carried out using significantly fewer rated items than previously proposed static inference methods.