Collaborative filtering via different preference structures

Recently, social network websites start to provide third-parity sign-in options via the OAuth 2.0 protocol. For example, users can login Netflix website using their Facebook accounts. By using this service, accounts of the same user are linked together, and so does their information. This fact provides an opportunity of creating more complete profiles of users, leading to improved recommender systems. However, user opinions distributed over different platforms are in different preference structures, such as ratings, rankings, pairwise comparisons, voting, etc. As existing collaborative filtering techniques assume the homogeneity of preference structure, it remains a challenge task of how to learn from different preference structures simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy preference relation-based approach to enable collaborative filtering via different preference structures. Experiment results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach can effectively learn from different preference structures, and show strong resistance to noises and biases introduced by cross-structure preference learning. Copyright © 2017 Springer International Publishing AG.