Design and evaluation of a recommender system

Abstract

In the recent years, the Web has undergone a tremendous growth regarding both content and users. This has lead to an information overload problem in which people are finding it increasingly difficult to locate the right information at the right time. Recommender systems have been developed to address this problem, by guiding users through the big ocean of information. Until now, recommender systems have been extensively used within e-commerce and communities where items like movies, music and articles are recommended. More recently, recommender systems have been deployed in online music players, recommending music that the users probably will like. This thesis will present the design, implementation, testing and evaluation of a recommender system within the music domain, where three different approaches for producing recommendations are utilized. Testing each approach is done by first conducting live user experiments and then measure recommender precision using offline analysis. Our results show that the functionality of the recommender system is satisfactory, and that recommender precision differs for the three filtering approaches.