High Quality Recommendations for Small Communities: The Case of a Regional Parent Network

Traditional recommender systems are well established in scenarios in which “enough ” items, users and ratings are available for the algorithms to operate on. However, automatic recommendations are also desirable in smaller online communities which only contain several hundred items and users. Collaborative filters, as one of the most successful technologies for recommender systems, do not perform well here. This paper argues that recommender systems can make use of contextual information and domain specific semantics in order to be able to generate recommendations also for these smaller usage scenarios. The new hybrid recommendation approach presented in the paper enhances traditional neighborhood-based collaborative filtering techniques through the use of new kinds of data and a combination of different recommendation methods (rule, demographic, and average based). While the algorithmic techniques presented in this paper are suitable (especially) for smaller online communities, they can also be applied to improve the quality of recommendations in larger communities. The approach was implemented and evaluated in a small regional bound parent education community. A multi-staged evaluation was conducted in order to determine the quality of recommendations: A cross-validation (recall), an expert questionnaire (recommendation quality) and a field study (user satisfaction). The results show that recommenders even for smaller communities are possible and can produce high quality recommendations