Collaborative Filtering for Dummies

Don’t let the title of University of Arizona’s Zan Huang, Hsinchun Chen, and Daniel Zeng’s paper on Applying Associative Retrieval Techniques to Alleviate the Sparsity Problem in Collaborative Filtering ([pdf]) fool you.

This is not only a great paper on how to combat the problem with too sparse matrices (too few data points on too many axes), but one of best academic papers around to explain different concepts on collaborative filtering.

Huang, et. al’s paper is a good summary of the field. Give it a read after you’ve browsed the usual suspects over at (Wikipedia, GroupLens, ACM digital library).