Random Walks on Human Knowledge: Incorporating Human Knowledge into Data-Driven Recommenders

We explore the use of recommender systems in business scenarios such as consultancy. In these situations, apart from personal preferences of users, knowledge about objective business-driven criteria plays a role. We investigate strategies for representing and incorporating such knowledge into data-driven recommenders. As a baseline, we choose a robust and flexible paradigm that is based on a simple graph-based representation of past customer cases and choices, in combination with biased random walks. On a real data set from a business intelligence consultancy firm, we study how the incorporation of two important types of explicit human knowledge – namely taxonomic and associative knowledge – impacts the effectiveness of a data-driven recommender. Our results show no consistent improvement for taxonomic knowledge, but quite substantial and significant gains when using associative knowledge.