A Probabilistic Recommendation Method Inspired by Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model

The recent decade has witnessed an increasing popularity of recommendation systems, which help users acquire relevant knowledge, commodities, and services from an overwhelming information ocean on the Internet. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), originally presented as a graphical model for text topic discovery, now has found its application in many other disciplines. In this paper, we propose an LDA-inspired probabilistic recommendation method by taking the user-item collecting behavior as a two-step process: every user first becomes a member of one latent user-group at a certain probability and each user-group will then collect various items with different probabilities. Gibbs sampling is employed to approximate all the probabilities in the two-step process. The experiment results on three real-world data sets MovieLens, Netflix, and Last.fm show that our method exhibits a competitive performance on precision, coverage, and diversity in comparison with the other four typical recommendation methods. Moreover, we present an approximate strategy to reduce the computing complexity of our method with a slight degradation of the performance.