DIGTOBI: A recommendation system for Digg articles using probabilistic modeling

Abstract

Digg is a social news website that lets people submit articles to share their favorite web pages (e.g. blog postings or news articles) and vote the articles posted by others. Digg service currently lists the articles in the front page by popularity without considering each user's preference to the topics in the articles. Helping users to find the most interesting Digg articles tailored to each user's own interests will be very use-ful, but it is not an easy task to classify the articles according to their topics in order to recommend the articles differently to each user. In this paper, we propose DIGTOBI, a personalized recommendation system for Digg articles using a novel probabilistic modeling. Our model considers the relevant articles with low Digg scores important as well. We show that our model can handle both warm-start and cold-start scenarios seamlessly through a single model. We next propose an EM algorithm to learn the parameters of our probabilistic model. Our performance study with Digg data confirms the effectiveness of DIGTOBI compared to the traditional recommendations algorithms. Copyright is held by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2).