Discovering both explicit and implicit similarities for cross-domain recommendation

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. Recommender System has become one of the most important techniques for businesses today. Improving its performance requires a thorough understanding of latent similarities among users and items. This issue is addressable given recent abundance of datasets across domains. However, the question of how to utilize this cross-domain rich information to improve recommendation performance is still an open problem. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain recommender as the first algorithm utilizing both explicit and implicit similarities between datasets across sources for performance improvement. Validated on real-world datasets, our proposed idea outperforms the current cross-domain recommendation methods by more than 2 times. Yet, the more interesting observation is that both explicit and implicit similarities between datasets help to better suggest unknown information from cross-domain sources