Recommendations based on ratings

I like the recommendations page, but some of the books used to make those recommendations (those listed under the "why?" link) are those that i rated poorly. it'd be nice to have a recommendation tool that takes into account the ratings i've given each book. i believe netflix has something like this in place.

Thanks!

I'd so like this too.

TIM has two main counter arguments - both of which are wrong.
1) Not enough people rate.
a) you can just skip the rating weighting if there isn't one.
b) more people would rate if it did somethign useful liek adjust the recommendations

2) Everybody rates the same about 4, because they mostly catalog books they own which are books they like.
a) This means that the books that are rated lowly are even more important!
b) use a finer distinction so that 3.9 is significantly worse than 4.0
c) - see 1b)
d) collections will increase the number of unowned books increasing the diversity of rating.

But I'm not hopeful he'll change his mind.

I do think Tim's arguments about ratings are wrong in general, but he does make another valid point here: just because people rate one book poorly doesn't mean they won't like other books like it; in fact, it may be quite the contrary, since they presumably read books that they expect to like.

So, if I like to read historical fiction set in Ancient Greece, but happen to read one terrible historical fiction book set in Ancient Greece, it doesn't mean I don't want recommendations for other historical fiction set in Ancient Greece. It just means that one book was bad.

But if you like to read historical fiction set in Ancient Greece then presumably you've read some of them that you did like and you put them in your catalog, so the one you didn't like shouldn't weigh very heavily on your recommendations.

3>

Maybe it's just that the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I don't understand your argument.

If you didn't like a particular historical fiction novel about ancient Greece, but like others in general, presumably other people feel the same -- and they will rank the stinker LOWER than other historical fiction novels about ancient Greece. Wouldn't you like to see that reflected? Or, conversely, to downweight the suggestions of people who thought that particular novel was the best ever historical novel about ancient Greece and all the others sucked?

Back in the creaky old pre-Web 2.0 days there was a book-rating site called Alexlit. I think it was before its time, and it might not have died if it had appeared later, when the web in general had become more social, but what it did -- ALL it did -- was recommend books (and short stories) it thought you'd like based on comparing your ratings with those of other people. It was very, very accurate, and good enough to be able to tell you that one book in a series was weak but you'd like the rest, for instance.

>5 lorax: I think we're talking about something slightly different: the OP was suggesting taking into account their own ratings for the book, whereas you seem to be thinking about taking into account the average rating. I agree that average rating is a lot more useful, and I do think it would be nice if books with horribly low average ratings were given less weighting in recommendations.

>4 jjwilson61: Looking at my catalogue, I just can't see much value in reducing the weighting for books that I didn't like. Sure, there are other similar ones that I did like, so it probably wouldn't hurt my recommendations, but for a feature to be worthwhile it has to actually help.

6>

Oh, that makes sense. I guess I'd always assumed "take ratings into account" meant "everyone's" rather than "mine". Just taking your own ratings into account doesn't seem worth the bother.

I'm actually talking about something even more complicated than average rating, though, and something that's probably computationally prohibitive: say that you've ranked books B and C very highly, and book A very low. This algorithm would go find everyone else with similar ratings, and then see what other books that group of people -- your "similar raters" -- had rated highly. When we're talking about libraries of thousands of books, and hundreds of thousands of users, this gets ugly fast, as I'm sure you can imagine -- which is a better argument against doing it than Tim's "the dynamic range of ratings is small" (which, as has been pointed out, just means the difference between a 3.5 and a 4.5 is significant.)

Oh, I agree that a more complicated algorithm would be much more effective than just the average. I just can't see it happening anytime soon.

But it does vaguely bother me that the #1 book on my recommendations list has a rating of 2.61. Especially since Tim is always quick to say that people rate high, it seems pretty obvious to me that this book is probably not worth reading. And I'd like the recommender to recommend books that are worth reading.

7> Just taking your own ratings into account doesn't seem worth the bother.

I disagree. My wife had me read the entirety of The Belgariad. I hated it, and my ratings reflect that. But because I have David Eddings' books in my library, his other stuff gets recommended to me. An algorithm that notices "Hey, you don't like David Eddings at all!" might actually stop recommending Eddings.

>9 saltmanz: I think things like that could be better dealt with by Collections. Turn your tag "Sarah's" into a collection separate from your main one, and then those books won't influence your recommendations anymore.

Assuming, of course, that collections eventually arrives and brings with it all the promised functionality.

9>

You can easily dismiss or ignore those recommendations, though. So I agree it would be nice, but maybe not enough to justify a serious code re-vamp. (I have a handful of books tagged "not recommended", on the hopes that someday they'll put a "not" flag into the "tag-based recommendation" system, so I can say "give me recommendations based on everything EXCEPT these books". That would be a much easier fix.

The reason I would like my personal ratings to be taken into account is because I might hate a book that has a very high average rating or vice versa. Obviously, I don't want a recommendation based on a book that I didn't like.

I like lorax's suggestion. It could be as simple as a column with boxes that we could check if we would like them excluded from the recommendation process.

Obviously, I don't want a recommendation based on a book that I didn't like.

My whole point in #3 was that this isn't obvious. The fact that you dislike a particular book doesn't necessarily imply that you don't want to read other books of that type.

13>

I don't think anyone's disagreeing with you -- they're saying that if the book they hated is someone else's Favorite Greek Historical Fiction Ever, they don't want recommendations from that particular comparison. Nobody's saying that they don't want any recommendations on books from a genre where they disliked one book.

>14 lorax: My point was that people might dislike a book, but still want recommendations based on that particular book. Maybe I should have used a more specific category than Greek Historical Fiction: I didn't like The Buried Book, but I'm still interested in many of the books on its recommendation lists, and the topic isn't common enough that these books would automatically be recommended to me through other books that I own.

It's not that I was worried that all similar books would be automatically excluded; it's that the similar books might not make it into my recommendations list if not for this particular book.

15>

Ah, now I get it. Sorry to have been so dense.

#11. You've got the tagging backwards. Instead of waiting for a Not functionality, I add the tag 'use' to the books I want recommendations for, and only look at the recommendations involving that tag.

Not only do I avoid books I don't like, by not adding it to Harry Potter for example you avoid all the derivative HP spin offs, that I'm not interested in reading.

However this doens't help if other people own books that they think are rubbish.

>17 reading_fox:
I like your comment about adding the "use" tag.
i'll do the same. a simple fix. :)

thanks!

>17 reading_fox:-18

I use a version of the "use" tag, but found that I ended up needing a pair of them: "Short List", and because it wasn't short at all, a "Shorter List".

Despite the tags, I still think using ratings would improve ratings.

I would like to have the right to choose. If i do not like an author, f.i.Molly Gloss, because i do not like her style or the topics of her books, i do not wish to receive a recommandation for another book of hers. i gave her 1 point for wild life and got one for another of her books.

so please change this.

20>

You can always ignore individual recommendations. Your tone -- not "this would be nice", but "change this", is extremely demanding. I agree it would be nice, but I'm not walking in and making demands.

1>

I like this idea, too. I don't really find _Zoe_'s thoughts very compelling on this point. The point seems to be that if you have a certain book, that should be more of a factor to base ratings on then the fact that you didn't like that book. I can't say that I agree.

Whether I like a book or not is my number 1 consideration when deciding whether or not to read similar books. If there's only one book of a certain genre/author/subject in My Books, and I rated it low, I am very happy if the LT Data Elves decide not to recommend other books based on that one. If that one book is an outlier, then I should have other, more representative books in my collection to balance it out. If that book is one of a kind, then I guess there won't be any recommendations based off of it anyway.

For example. I have frequently been the recipient of a certain class of books that I do not like. I dutifully add all books to My Books, but the larger this subset becomes, the more I will have recommendations based off of it. It would be nice if I could just rate them poorly and not receive recommendations based off of them. Instead, the more I add, the more LT will recommend similar books.

I do understand Tim's point that not everyone rates their books. That means any enhancement in this area would serve a limited percentage of the LT population. He and the LT crew should definitely focus their efforts on enhancements that will improve the experience of the most number of users. But I also agree that if ratings had a bigger influence, more people might use them.

As for most people rating their own books highly, that may well be true, but it seems like that just makes it even more likely that the system might want to notice if a book is rated low.

Note that one of the features of Collections is supposed to be that you can group books into a collection that doesn't get used for recommendations. So you can list your gift books but put them into a Gifts or Not Interested or whatever collection, mark that collection not to be used for recommendations, and you escape recommendations for those books.

I'm going to be doing that with a Discarded collection - that's books I bought and got rid of. Some are duplicates and I like them, but an awful lot are books I read once and decided I didn't want to ever read them again. I want to keep them in my collection just to keep track (and to remind myself that I really _don't_ like that book, even though the blurb sounds good), but I will be delighted when I can prevent them from affecting my recommendations.

Oh - yes, it would be great if recommendations paid attention to ratings - either the relatively simple way (if you rated this low, it weighs low in recommendations) or the complex way (lorax's 'similar raters' algorithm). But I don't think it's going to happen, at least not anytime soon.

ETA address the point of this thread

I do understand Tim's point that not everyone rates their books. ... But I also agree that if ratings had a bigger influence, more people might use them. (#22)

I'm with you on this. Saying that because only some users rate books, we shouldn't do something based on ratings (which in all likelyhood more people would use if they did something) seems a little defeatist to me.

Thank you, I'm a new user and I just put in a bunch of books and rated them, this thread answered a lot of questions. Now that I have read the collections section I understand how it is supposed to work. However I have now put the books I rated poorly in a collection not to be used in recommendations and they are still being used. I am wondering does it just take time for the collections feature to kick in, have I done something wrong, or is their currently a bug that is getting in the way?

Also I was hoping there was an algorithm for the ratings sort of like movielens.

Did you remove them from the "Your library" collection as well?

Edit: If it is your collection "Yuck" (nice name, btw) then it appears that you did remove them from "Your library" collection. When did you do this? It does take some time for caching to kick in for recommendations.

I did remove them from my library, I'll wait a while and see how it goes.

Oh, also thanks. Sorry I didn't mean to be rude.

Damn, was posting before the site went down and then lost the post!

So take two: I use collections to ignore certain books from recommendations, however, I do it a slightly different way to that discussed in 25.

First, I unchecked "use for recommendations" from all of my collections, including Your Library. I then created a new collection called "Use for Recommendations" and ticked the "use for recommendations" check box, so that this new collection is the only collection from which recommendations are generated. I then move books to/from this collection based on my own personal rules and I don't get any recommendations for books I didn't like.

It seems to work really well for me (although, I seem to be getting really strange recommendations from The Phantom of the Opera at the moment - I think there's a bad combination there somewhere involving an early readers version, but I don't have time to sort it out).

No problems, didn't even think it!

I think that it would be nice if we could stop individual books from making recommendations (as in posts 11 & 12), instead of ignoring the recommendations themselves, without having to go into the whole collections thing. Some books I like to keep in My Library even though I wouldn't necessarily want recommendations from them.

I can't always tell what books will give me recommendations I don't like, and sometimes it happens for books that I do like, so I can't always filter them out beforehand.