Research Note–The Halo Effect in Multicomponent Ratings and Its Implications for Recommender Systems: The Case of Yahoo! Movies

Collaborative filtering algorithms learn from the ratings of a group of users on a set of items to find personalized recommendations for each user. Traditionally they have been designed to work with one‐dimensional ratings. With interest growing in recommendations based on multiple aspects of items, we present an algorithm for using multicomponent rating data. The presented mixture model‐based algorithm uses the component rating dependency structure discovered by a structure learning algorithm. The structure is supported by the psychometric literature on the halo effect. This algorithm is compared with a set of model‐based and instance‐based algorithms for single‐component ratings and their variations for multicomponent ratings. We evaluate the algorithms using data from Yahoo! Movies. Use of multiple components leads to significant improvements in recommendations. However, we find that the choice of algorithm depends on the sparsity of the training data. It also depends on whether the task of the algorithm is to accurately predict ratings or to retrieve relevant items. In our experiments a model‐based multicomponent rating algorithm is able to better retrieve items when training data are sparse. However, if the training data are not sparse, or if we are trying to predict the rating values accurately, then the instance‐based multicomponent rating collaborative filtering algorithms perform better. Beyond generating recommendations we show that the proposed model can fill in missing rating components. Theories in psychometric literature and the empirical evidence suggest that rating specific aspects of a subject is difficult. Hence, filling in the missing component values leads to the possibility of a rater support system to facilitate gathering of multicomponent ratings.