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Evaluating Similarity Measures:
             A Large-Scale Study in the Orkut Social Network

                               Ellen Spertus                                 Mehran Sahami, Orkut Buyukkokten
                               Mills College                                                   Google
                           5000 MacArthur Blvd.                                       1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
                            Oakland, CA 94613                                          Mountain View, CA 94043
                           spertus@mills.edu                                                   orkut}@google.com
                                                                                  {sahami,



ABSTRACT                                                                    affiliated with Google. The original mechanisms for users
                                                                            to find communities were labor-intensive, including search-
Online information services have grown too large for users
                                                                            ing for keywords in community titles and descriptions or
to navigate without the help of automated tools such as col-
                                                                            browsing other users’ memberships. Four months after its
laborative filtering, which makes recommendations to users
                                                                            January 2004 debut, Orkut had over 50,000 communities,
based on their collective past behavior. While many similar-
                                                                            providing the necessity and opportunity for data-mining for
ity measures have been proposed and individually evaluated,
                                                                            automated recommendations. There are now (May 2005)
they have not been evaluated relative to each other in a large
                                                                            over 1,500,000 communities.
real-world environment. We present an extensive empirical
                                                                               While there are many forms of recommender systems [3],
comparison of six distinct measures of similarity for recom-
                                                                            we chose a collaborative filtering approach [13] based on
mending online communities to members of the Orkut social
                                                                            overlapping membership of pairs of communities. We did
network. We determine the usefulness of the different rec-
                                                                            not make use of semantic information, such as the descrip-
ommendations by actually measuring users’ propensity to
                                                                            tion of or messages in a community (although this may be an
visit and join recommended communities. We also exam-
                                                                            area of future work). Our recommendations were on a per-
ine how the ordering of recommendations influenced user
                                                                            community, rather than a per-user basis; that is, all mem-
selection, as well as interesting social issues that arise in
                                                                            bers of a given community would see the same recommen-
recommending communities within a real social network.
                                                                            dations when visiting that community’s page. We chose this
                                                                            approach out of the belief, which was confirmed, that com-
Categories and Subject Descriptors                                          munity memberships were rich enough to make very useful
                                                                            recommendations without having to perform more compu-
H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications—
                                                                            tationally intensive operations, such as clustering of users or
data mining; H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]:
                                                                            communities or computing nearest neighbor relations among
Online Information Services; I.5 [Computing Methodolo-
                                                                            users. Indeed, Sarwar et al. have found such item-based al-
gies]: Pattern Recognition
                                                                            gorithms to be both more efficient and successful than user-
                                                                            based algorithms [13]. By measuring user acceptance of rec-
General Terms
                                                                            ommendations, we were able to evaluate the absolute and
Algorithms, measurement, human factors                                      relative utility of six different similarity measures on a large
                                                                            volume of data.
Keywords
Data mining, collaborative filtering, recommender system,                    2.   MEASURES OF SIMILARITY
similarity measure, online communities, social networks
                                                                              The input data came from the membership relation M =
                                                                            {(u, c) | u ∈ U, c ∈ C} , where C is the set of communities
1. INTRODUCTION                                                             with at least 20 members and U the set of users belong-
                                                                            ing to at least one such community. When we began our
   The amount of information available online grows far faster
                                                                            experiment in May 2004, |C| = 19, 792, |U| = 181, 160, and
than an individual’s ability to assimilate it. For example,
                                                                            |M| = 2, 144, 435. Table 1 summarizes the distribution.
consider “communities” (user-created discussion groups) with-
                                                                              All of our measures of community similarity involve the
in Orkut, a social-networking website (http://www.orkut.com)
                                                                            overlap between two communities, i.e., the number of com-



                                                                             Table 1: Distribution of community memberships

                                                                                                           min    max    median       σ
Copyright 2005ACM. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted    Users per community           20     9077     50       230.5
here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.     Communities per user           1     4173     6        28.0
The definitive version was published in KDD ’05, August 21-24, 2005
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1081870.1081956
2.1.3    Pointwise Mutual-Information: positive corre-
mon users. If a base community b and a (potentially) related
                                                                           lations (MI1)
community r are considered as sets of users, the overlap is
|B ∩ R|, where we use capital letters to represent the set con-      Information theory motivates other measures of correla-
taining a community’s members. Note that overlap cannot           tion, such as “mutual information” [2]. We chose pointwise
be the sole factor in relatedness, as the size of communities     mutual information where we only count “positive” corre-
varies greatly. If we only considered overlap, practically ev-    lations (membership in both B and R). Such a formulation
ery community would be considered related to the “Linux”          essentially focuses on how membership in one group is pre-
community, which was the most popular, with 9,077 mem-            dictive of membership in another (without considering how
bers. The similarity measures in the next section normalize       base non-membership in a group effects membership in an-
the overlap in different ways.                                     other group), yielding:
2.1     Similarity Measure Functions
                                                                                                             P(r, b)
   Each similarity measure we consider is presented as a (pos-                 M I1(b, r) = P(r, b) · lg
                                                                                                           P(r) · P(b)
sibly asymmetric) function of b and r indicating how appro-
priate the related community r is as a recommendation for
                                                                  2.1.4    Pointwise Mutual-Information: positive and
the base community b. We do not use the result of the
                                                                           negative correlations (MI2)
function as an absolute measure of similarity, only to rank
                                                                    Similarly, we can compute the pointwise mutual infor-
recommendations for a given base community.
                                                                  mation with both positive and negative correlations (e.g.,
2.1.1 L1-Norm                                                     membership in both B and R, or non-membership in both
                                                                  groups). Again, we don’t compute the full expected mutual
  If we − consider the base and related communities to be
         →
vectors b and − , where the ith element of a vector is 1 if
                 →                                                information, since we believe cross-correlations (e.g., how
                 r
                                                                  membership in B affects non-membership in R) tend to be
user i is a member and 0 if not, we can measure the overlap
                                                                  distortive with the recommendation task since such cross-
as the product of their L1-norms:
                                                                  correlations are plentiful but not very informative. This
                                  −−
                                  →→                              yields:
                  →
                  −−              b·r
               L1( b , →) =
                       r        →
                                −
                                   ·− →
                                b     r                                                                                  P(¯, ¯
                                    1          1                                                P(r, b)                     r b)
                                                                                                          + P(¯, ¯ · lg
                                                                  M I2(b, r) = P(r, b) · lg                   r b)
This quantity can also be expressed in set notation, where                                                              P(¯) · P(¯
                                                                                              P(r) · P(b)                 r      b)
we use a capital letter to represent the set containing a com-
                                                                  2.1.5    Salton (IDF)
munity’s members:
                                                                    Salton proposed a measure of similarity based on inverse
                                 |B ∩ R|                          document frequency scaling (tf-idf) [12]:
                    L1(B, R) =
                                 |B| · |R|
Note that this evaluates to the overlap between the two                           IDF (b, r) = P (r|b) · (− lg P(r))
groups divided by the product of their sizes. When the
base community is held constant (as when we determine the                                        |B ∩ R|         |R|
                                                                                                         · (− lg
                                                                                 IDF (B, R) =                        )
base community’s recommendations), this evaluates to the                                           |B|           |U|
overlap divided by the size of the related community, fa-
                                                                  2.1.6    Log-Odds
voring small communities. Kitts et al. [9] reported this to
be a successful measure of similarity in their recommender          We first considered the standard log-odds function, which
system.                                                           measures the relative likelihood that presence or absence in
                                                                  a base community predicts membership in a related commu-
2.1.2    L2-Norm
                                                                  nity:
  Similarly, we can measure the overlap with the product of
                                               →
                                               −
the L2-norms (“cosine distance” [3, 6, 12]) of b and →:
                                                     −                                                     P(r|b)
                                                     r                              LogOdds0(b, r) = lg
                                                                                                           P(r|¯
                                                                                                               b)
                                    −−
                                    →→
                                                                  Empirically, we found this generated the exact same rank-
                  →
                  −→                b·r
               L2( b , − ) =
                       r        −
                                →                                 ings as using the L1-Norm, which makes sense because:
                                     ·− →
                                b       r
                                    2          2

In set notation:                                                    1. Logarithm is monotonic and, while affecting scores,
                                                                       does not affect rankings.
                                  |B ∩ R|
                                                                    2. Constant factors, such as |B|, do not affect rankings.
                   L2(B, R) =
                                   |B| · |R|
                                                                                    |U |, P(r|¯ ≈ P(r)
                                                                    3. For |B|                b)
Note that the square-root in the denominator causes L2 to
penalize large communities less severely than L1.                 We formulated a different log-odds metric, which measures
  Observe that the L2-norm presented here is equivalent to        whether membership in the base community is likelier to
the widely used cosine coefficient applied to binary data.          predict membership or absence in the related community:
Moreover, while Pearson correlation has been used previ-
ously in recommender systems where ranking data is avail-
                                                                                                           P(r|b)
able, we did not use this measure here since it is generally                        LogOdds(b, r) = lg
                                                                                                           P(¯|b)
                                                                                                             r
considered inappropriate for binary data.
top scores, leading to MI1 and IDF often giving the same
Table 2: Average size of top-ranked community for                       ranking to top-scoring communities. (Note that this pertur-
each measure                                                            bation quantity is given only to explain the high correlation
                                                                        between MI1 and IDF. Statistically, it is meaningless, since
             measure              Average size
                                                                        b and ¯ cannot simultaneously hold.)
                                                                              b
                            rank 1 rank 2 rank 3
                L1            332     482       571
                L2            460     618       694
                                                                        3.    EXPERIMENT DESIGN
               MI1            903     931       998
                                                                           We designed an experiment to determine the relative value
               MI2            966    1003      1077
               IDF            923     985      1074                     of the recommendations produced by each similarity mea-
             LogOdds          357     513       598                     sure. This involved interleaving different pairs of recommen-
                                                                        dations and tracking user clicks. Specifically, we measured
                                                                        the efficacy of different similarity measures using pair-wise
                                                                        binomial sign tests on click-through data rather than us-
Table 3: Agreement in top-ranked results between                        ing traditional supervised learning measures such as preci-
measures. For example, MI1 and IDF rank the same                        sion/recall or accuracy since there is no “true” labeled data
related community first for 98% of base communi-                         for this task (i.e., we do not know what are the correct com-
ties. Correlations greater than 85% are in bold.                        munities that should be recommended to a user). Rather,
                                                                        we focused on the task of determining which of the similar-
       L1
                                                                        ity measures performs best on a relative performance scale
       .70      L2
                                                                        with regard to acceptance by users.
       .41      .60     MI1
       .39      .57     .96     MI2
                                                                        3.1    Combination
       .41      .59     .98     .97      IDF
       .88      .79     .46     .44       .46   LogOdds                    When a user viewed a community page, we hashed the
                                                                        combined user and community identifiers to one of 30 val-
                                                                        ues, specifying an ordered pair of similarity measures to
                                                                        compare. Let S and T be the ordered lists of recommenda-
2.2   Discussion                                                        tions for the two measures, where S = (s1 , s2 , . . . , s|S| ) and
  For a given measure, we refer to the related community                T = (t1 , t2 , . . . , t|T | ) and |S| = |T |. The recommendations of
yielding the highest value to be the top-ranked related com-            each measure are combined by Joachims’ “Combined Rank-
munity relative to a base community. The average size                   ing” algorithm [7], restated in Figure 1. The resulting list is
of top-ranked communities for each measure, which varies                guaranteed to contain the top kS and kT recommendations
greatly, is shown in Table 2. Table 3 shows how often two               for each measure, where kT ≤ kS ≤ kT + 1 [7, Theorem 1].
functions yield the same top-ranking result. Table 4 shows
                                                                        3.2    Measurements
the top recommendations for the “I love wine” community.
Note that MI1, MI2, and IDF favor very large communities,                  Whenever a user visited a community, two measures were
while L1 and LogOdds favor small communities.                           chosen and their recommendations interleaved, as discussed
  Note that in addition to the obvious correlations between             above. This was done in a deterministic manner so that
the two mutual-information functions (96%), there is a very             a given user always saw the same recommendations for a
strong correlation between IDF and the mutual-information               given community. To minimize feedback effects, we did not
functions (97-98%). Manipulation of the formulas for MI1                regenerate recommendations after the experiment began.
and IDF shows:                                                             A user who views a base community (e.g., “I love wine”) is
                                                                        either a member (denoted by “M”) or non-member (denoted
                               P(r, b)
               = P(r, b) · lg
M I1(b, r)                                                              by “n”). (We capitalize “M” but not “n” to make them eas-
                           P(r) · P(b)
                                                                        ier to visually distinguish.) In either case, recommendations
               = P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r|b) − P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r)
                                                                        are shown. When a user clicks on a recommendation, there
                     P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r|b)
               =                                                        are three possibilities: (1) the user is already a member of
                     −P(r|b) · [1 − P(¯ · lg P(r)                       the recommended community (“M”), (2) the user joins the
                                       b)]
                                                                        recommended community (“j”), or (3) the user visits but
                     P(r|b)·[P(b) · lg P(r|b) + P(r|b)·P(¯ · lg P(r)]
               =                                         b)
                                                                        does not join the recommended community (“n”). The com-
                     −P(r|b) · lg P(r)                                  bination of base and related community memberships can be
                                                                        combined in six different ways. For example “M→j” denotes
Substituting IDF (b, r) = −P (r|b) · lg P(r), we get:
                                                                        a click where a member of the base community clicks on a
                   = P(r|b) · P(b) · lg P(r|b) + P(¯ · lg P(r)
  M I1(b, r)                                       b)                   recommendation to another community to which she does
                                                                        not belong and joins that community. Traditionally, anal-
                       +IDF (b, r)
                                                                        yses of recommender systems focus on “M→j”, also known
                                                      P (¯ we can
Since for virtually all communities b, P (b)             b),            informally as “if you like this, you’ll like that” or formally
approximate:                                                            as “similarity” or “conversion”. “M→n” recommendations
                                                                        are considered distracters, having negative utility, since they
       M I1(b, r) ≈ IDF (b, r) + P(r|b) · P(¯ · lg P(r)
                                            b)
                                                                        waste a user’s time with an item not of interest. Before run-
   Thus, MI1 yields a ranking that can be thought of as start-          ning the experiment, we decided that the measures should
ing with the ranking of IDF and perturbing the score of each            be judged on their “M→j” performance.
element in the ranking by P(r|b) · P(¯ · lg P(r), which gener-
                                     b)                                    Other interpretations are possible: “M→n” links could be
ally is not great enough to change the relative ranking of the          considered to have positive utility for any of the following
Table 4: Top recommendations for each measure for the “I love wine” community, with each recommended
community’s overlap with the base community and size. The size of “I love wine” is 2400.

             L1                  L2                  MI1                MI2                 IDF                 LogOdds
         1   Ice Wine            Red Wine            Japanese           Japanese            Japanese            Japanese
             (Eiswein)           (208/690)           Food/Sushi         Food/Sushi          Food/Sushi          Food/Sushi
             (33/51)                                 Lovers             Lovers              Lovers              Lovers
                                                     (370/3206)         (370/3206)          (370/3206)          (370/3206)
         2   California          Cheeses of the      Red Wine           Red Wine            Photography         Photography
             Pinot Noir          World               (208/690)          (208/690)           (319/4679)          (319/4679)
             (26/41)             (200/675)
         3   Winery              I love red          Cheeses of the     Cheeses of the      Red Wine            Linux
             Visitor -           wine!               World              World               (208/690)           (299/9077)
             Worldwide           (170/510)           (200/675)          (200/675)
             (44/74)




                             Figure 1: Joachims’ “Combine Rankings” algorithm [7]
                  ordered recommendation lists S = (s1 , s2 , . . . , s|S| ) and T = (t1 , t2 , . . . , t|T | ) where |S| = |T |
           Input:
                  combine (S, T, 0, 0, ∅)
            Call:
          Output: combined ordered recommendation list D
          combine(S, T, ks , kt , D){
                  if (ks < |S| ∧ kt < |T |)
                                  if (ks = kt ) {
                                                  if (S[ks + 1] ∈ D){D := D + S[ks + 1]; }
                                                                 /
                                                  combine(S, T, ks + 1, kt , D);
                                  } else {
                                                  if (T [kt + 1] ∈ D){D := D + T [kt + 1]; }
                                                                 /
                                                  combine(S, T, ks , kt + 1, D);
                                  }
                  }
             }




Table 5: Clicks on recommendations, by membership status in the base and recommended communities, as
counts and as percentages of total clicks. The last column shows the conversion rate, defined as the percentage
                                                                         j
of non-members clicking on a related community who then joined it ( n+j ).
    membership in base community membership in recommended community
                                         M (member) n (non-member)      j (join)    total  conversion rate
       M (member): number of clicks         36353        184214         212982     433549         54%
                 percent of total clicks     4%           20%             24%        48%
    n (non-member): number of clicks        8771         381241          77905     467917         17%
                 percent of total clicks     1%           42%              9%        52%
               total: number of clicks      45124        565455         290887     901466         34%
                 percent of total clicks     5%           63%             32%       100%
reasons:                                                             by measure L2 than measure L1, for example, we consid-
                                                                     ered it a “win” for L2 and a loss for L1. If both measures
     1. As the user found the link sufficiently interesting to         ranked it equally, the result was considered to be a tie. Ta-
        click on, it was of more utility than a link not eliciting   ble 6 shows the outcomes of all clicks, with conversions by
        a click.                                                     members (“M→j”) and non-members of the base community
                                                                     (“n→j”) broken out separately.
     2. The user is genuinely interested in the related com-           We say that a measure dominates another if, in their pair-
        munity but does not want to proclaim her interest, as        wise comparison, the former has more “wins”. For example,
        membership information is public and some communi-           L2 dominates L1. This definition, combined with the data
        ties focus on taboo or embarrassing topics. For exam-        in Table 6, yielded a total order (to our surprise) among
        ple, a recommendation given for the popular “Choco-          the measures: L2, MI1, MI2, IDF, L1, LogOdds. The same
        late” community is “PMS”. Note that this effect is spe-       total order occurred if only “n→j” clicks were considered.
        cific to social networks and not, for example, Usenet         The order was different if all clicks were considered: L2, L1,
        groups, where the user’s list of communities is not re-      MI1, MI2, IDF, LogOdds.
        vealed to other users.
                                                                     4.2   Conversion rates
Similarly, it is unclear how to value clicks from a base com-          There was great variance in conversion rate by recom-
munity that the user does not belong to. Does an “n→j”               mended community. We examined the 93 recommended
click indicate failure, since the base community was not             communities that were clicked through to more than 1000
joined by the user, but the recommended community was,               times. Unsurprisingly, the ten with the lowest conversion
indicating a degree of dissimilarity? Or is it of positive           rate all were about sex (e.g., Amateur Porn). Note that
utility, since it helped a user find a community of interest?         members of the base community were far more willing than
For these reasons, we tracked all clicks, recording the user’s       non-members to join, perhaps because they had already
membership status in the base and recommended commu-                 shown their willingness to join a sex-related community. At
nities for later analysis. (We did not track whether users           the other extreme, none of the ten with the highest con-
returned to communities in the future because of the log-            version rate were sexual (e.g., Flamenco). Table 7 provides
ging overhead that would be required.)                               selected data by each membership combination. Unsurpris-
                                                                     ingly, for all 93 base communities, members were more likely
3.3      User Interface                                              than non-members to join the recommended community.
  On community pages, our recommendations were pro-
                                                                     4.3   User comments
vided in a table, each cell of which contained a recommended
community’s name, optional picture, and link (Figure 2).                Users were also able to submit feedback on related com-
Recommendations were shown by decreasing rank from left              munities. Most of the feedback was from users who wanted
to right, top to bottom, in up to 4 rows of 3. For aesthetic         recommendations added or removed. Some complained a-
reasons, we only showed entire rows; thus, no recommen-              bout inappropriate recommendations of sexual or political
dations were displayed if there were fewer than 3. We also           communities, especially if they found the displayed image
provided a control that allowed users to send us comments            offensive. A few objected to our generating related commu-
on the recommendations.                                              nity recommendations at all, instead of allowing community
                                                                     creators to specify them. In one case, poor recommenda-
                                                                     tions destroyed a community: The creator of a feminist sex-
4.     RESULTS
                                                                     uality community disbanded it both because of the prurient
   We analyzed all accesses between July 1, 2004, to July 18,
                                                                     recommendations that appeared on her page and the disrup-
2004, of users who joined Orkut during that period. The sys-
                                                                     tive new members who joined as a result of recommendations
tem served 4,106,050 community pages with recommenda-
                                                                     from such communities. We agreed with her that the recom-
tions, which provides a lower bound on the number of views.
                                                                     mendations were problematic and offered to remove them.
(Unfortunately, we could not determine the total number of
                                                                     While anecdotal, this example illustrates how a recommen-
views due to browser caching.) There were 901,466 clicks on
                                                                     dation can have unanticipated consequences that cannot be
recommendations, 48% by members of the base community,
                                                                     captured in simple statistical measures. (An informal dis-
52% by non-members (Table 5). Clicks to related communi-
                                                                     cussion of users’ behavior when we allowed them to choose
ties to which the user already belonged were rare, accounting
                                                                     related communities can be found elsewhere [14].)
for only 5% of clicks. The most common case was for a non-
member of a base community to click through and not join
                                                                     5.    POSITIONAL EFFECTS
a related community (42%).
   We defined conversion rate (also called precision) as the             During the above experiment, we became curious how the
percentage of non-members who clicked through to a com-              relative placement of recommendations affected users’ selec-
munity who then joined it. The conversion rate was three             tions and performed a second experiment.
times as high (54%) when the member belonged to the base
                                                                     5.1   Design
community (from which the recommendation came) than
not (17%).                                                              After determining that L2 was the best measure of simi-
                                                                     larity, we recomputed the recommendations and studied the
4.1      Relative performance of different measures                  effect of position on click-through. While in our original
   We compared each measure pairwise against every other             experiment we displayed up to 12 recommendations in de-
measure by analyzing clicks of their merged recommenda-              creasing rank, for this experiment we displayed up to 9 rec-
tions. If the click was on a recommendation ranked higher            ommendations in random order, again ensuring that each
Table 6: The relative performance of each measure in pairwise combination on clicks leading to joins, divided
by base community membership status, and on all clicks. Except where numbers appear in italics, the
superioriority of one measure over another was statistically significant (p < .01) using a binomial sign test
[10].

                                               M→j                      n→j
                         measures                                                              all clicks
                                       win     equal   loss    win      equal   loss    win      equal       loss
                      L2      MI1      6899     2977   4993    2600     1073    1853   30664    12277       20332
                      L2      MI2      6940     2743   5008    2636     1078    1872   31134    11260       19832
                      L2      IDF      6929     2697   5064    2610     1064    1865   30710    11271       20107
                      L2       L1      7039     2539   4834    2547      941    1983   28506    13081       23998
                      L2    LogOdds    8186     1638   4442    2852      564    1655   34954     6664       18631
                     MI1      MI2      3339     9372   1855    1223     3401     683   14812    37632       7529
                     MI1      IDF      3431     8854   1891    1139     3288     629   14671    37049       7758
                     MI1    LogOdds    7099     3546   3341    2514     1213    1193   29837    13869       13921
                     MI1       L1      6915     1005   6059    2547      407    2338   27786     4308       29418
                     MI2      IDF      1564    11575   1031     533     4266     359    6003    47885        4490
                     MI2    LogOdds    6920     3959   3177    2484     1418     598    2881    15308       13188
                     MI2       L1      6830     950    6419    2383      362    2333   26865     3872       29864
                     IDF       L1      6799     1006   6304    2467      392    2352   27042     4069       29755
                     IDF    LogOdds    6691     3804   3096    2452     1378    1085   28224    15013       13330
                      L1    LogOdds    6730     518    5975    2521      108    2059   31903     2097       24431



Table 7: Conversion rates by status of membership in base community, for communities to which more than
1000 clicks on recommendations occurred.
                                              member of base community                non-member of base community
        Related community             M→M       M→j     M→j conversion rate        n→M    n→n    n→M conversion rate
        10 communities with highest
        conversion rates               583      2273   6984            75%          198     3454       2017         37%
        10 communities with lowest
        conversion rates               326      1984    826            29%          68      26287      472          1.8%
        all 93 communities            13524    54415   52614           46%         3488    127819     19007         17%




user always saw the same ordering of recommendations for              formation, which we found more intuitive. For future work,
a given community. By randomizing the position of recom-              we would like to see how recommendations handpicked by
mendations, we sought to measure ordering primacy effects              community owners compare.
in the recommendations as opposed to their ranked quality.               Just as we can estimate communities’ similarity through
                                                                      common users, we can estimate users’ similarity through
5.2   Results                                                         common community memberships: i.e., user A might be
                                                                      similar to user B because they belong to n of the same com-
   We measured all 1,279,226 clicks on related community
                                                                      munities. It will be interesting to see whether L2 also proves
recommendations from September 22, 2004, through Oc-
                                                                      superior in such a domain. We could also take advantage
tober 21, 2004. Table 8 shows the relative likelihood of
                                                                      of Orkut’s being a social network [8], i.e., containing in-
clicks on each position. When there was only a single row,
                                                                      formation on social connections between pairs of users. In
the middle recommendation was clicked most, followed by
                                                                      addition to considering common community memberships,
the leftmost, then rightmost recommendations, although the
                                                                      we could consider distance between users in the “friendship
differences were not statistically significant. When there
                                                                      graph”. Users close to each other (e.g., friends or friends-
were two or three rows, the differences were very significant
                                                                      of-friends) might be judged more likely to be similar than
(p < .001), with preferences for higher rows. P-values were
                                                                      distant strangers, although some users might prefer the lat-
computed using a Chi-Squared test comparing the observed
                                                                      ter type of link, since it would introduce them to someone
click-through rates with a uniform distribution over all po-
                                                                      they would be unlikely to meet otherwise, perhaps from a
sitions [10].
                                                                      different country or culture.
                                                                         Similarly, friendship graph information can be taken into
6.    CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLANS                                     account when making community recommendations, which
  Orkut’s large number of community memberships and us-               would require that recommendations be computed on a per-
ers allowed us to evaluate the relative performance of six            user (or per-clique), rather than per-community, basis. In
different measures of similarity in a large-scale real-world           such a setting, we could make community recommendations
study. We are not aware of any comparable published large-            based on weighted community overlap vectors where weights
scale experiments. We were surprised that a total order               are determined based on the graph distances of other com-
emerged among the similarity measures and that L2 vec-                munity members to a given user. This is a fertile area for
tor normalization showed the best empirical results despite           future work and yet another example of how the interaction
other measures, such as log-odds and pointwise mutual in-
Figure 2: Displays of recommendations for three different communities




Table 8: The relative likelihood of clicks on link by position when there are (a) one, (b) two, or (c) three
rows of three recommendations.


            (a) n=28108, p=.12                         (b) n=24459, p<.001                    (c) n=1226659, p<.001
          1.00     1.01      .98                     1.04     1.05      1.08                 1.11      1.06     1.04
                                                     .97       .94       .92                 1.01       .97      .99
                                                                                             1.01      .94       .87



of data mining and social networks is becoming an exciting          [6] Harman, D. Ranking Algorithms. In W. B. Frakes and R.
                                                                        Baeza-Yates (ed.), Information Retrieval: Data Structures
new research area [4] [11].
                                                                        & Algorithms (chapter 14). Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA:
                                                                        Prentice Hall, 1992.
7.   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS                                                [7] Joachims, T. Evaluating Retrieval Performance Using
  This work was performed while Ellen Spertus was on sab-               Clickthrough Data. In Proceedings of the SIGIR Workshop
                                                                        on Mathematical/Formal Methods in Information
batical from Mills College and a visiting scientist at Google.
                                                                        Retrieval (2002). ACM Press, New York, NY.
We are grateful to Patrick Barry, Alex Drobychev, Jen Fitz-
                                                                    [8] Kautz, H.; Selman, Bart; Shah, M. Referral Web:
patrick, Julie Jalalpour, Dave Jeske, Katherine Lew, Marissa
                                                                        Combining Social Networks and Collaborative Filtering.
Mayer, Tom Nielsen, Seva Petrov, Greg Reshko, Catherine                 Communications of the ACM 45(8) (March 1997).
Rondeau, Adam Sawyer, Eric Sachs, and Lauren Simpson                [9] Kitts, B.; Freed, D.; Vrieze, M. Cross-Sell: A Fast
for their help on the Orkut project and to Corey Anderson,              Promotion-Tunable Customer-Item Recommendation
Alex Drobychev, Oren Etzioni, Alan Eustace, Keith Golden,               Method based on Conditionally Independent Probabilities.
                                                                        In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International
Carrie Grimes, Pedram Keyani, John Lamping, Tom Nielsen,
                                                                        Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Peter Norvig, Kerry Rodden, Gavin Tachibana, and Yonatan
                                                                        (Boston, 2000). ACM Press, New York, NY, 437-446.
Zunger for their help on this research or its exposition.
                                                                   [10] Lehmann, E.L. Testing Statistical Hypotheses (second
                                                                        edition). Springer-Verlag, 1986.
8.   REFERENCES                                                    [11] Raghavan, P. Social Networks and the Web (Invited Talk).
 [1] Breese, J.; Heckerman, D.; Kadie, C. Empirical Analysis of         In Advances in Web Intelligence: Proceedings of the
     Predictive Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering. In              Second International Atlantic Web Intelligence
     Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty            Conference, May 2004. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg.
     in Artificial Intelligence (Madison, Wisconsin, 1998).
                                                                   [12] Salton, G. Automatic Text Processing: The
     Morgan Kaufmann.
                                                                        Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by
 [2] Cover, T.M., and Thomas, J.A. Elements of Information              Computer. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989.
     Theory. Wiley, New York, 1991.
                                                                   [13] Sarwar, B.; Karypis, G.; Konstan, J.; Reidl, J. Item-Based
 [3] Deshpande, M., and Karypis, G. Item-Based Top-N                    Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms. In
     Recommendation Algorithms. ACM Transactions on                     Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the
     Information Systems 22(1) (January 2004), 143-177.                 World Wide Web (WWW10) (Hong Kong, 2001). ACM
 [4] Domingos, P. Prospects and Challenges for                          Press, New York, NY, 285-295.
     Multi-Relational Data Mining. ACM SIGKDD Exploration          [14] Spertus, Ellen. Too Much Information. Orkut Media
     Newsletter 5(1) (July 2003).                                       Selections, January 19, 2005. Available online at
 [5] Dumais, S.; Joachims, T.; Bharat, K.; Weigend, A. SIGIR            “http://media.orkut.com/articles/0078.html”.
     2003 Workshop Report: Implicit Measures of User Interests
     and Preferences. SIGIR Forum 37(2) (Fall 2003).

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Evaluating Similarity Measures in Orkut

  • 1. Evaluating Similarity Measures: A Large-Scale Study in the Orkut Social Network Ellen Spertus Mehran Sahami, Orkut Buyukkokten Mills College Google 5000 MacArthur Blvd. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Oakland, CA 94613 Mountain View, CA 94043 spertus@mills.edu orkut}@google.com {sahami, ABSTRACT affiliated with Google. The original mechanisms for users to find communities were labor-intensive, including search- Online information services have grown too large for users ing for keywords in community titles and descriptions or to navigate without the help of automated tools such as col- browsing other users’ memberships. Four months after its laborative filtering, which makes recommendations to users January 2004 debut, Orkut had over 50,000 communities, based on their collective past behavior. While many similar- providing the necessity and opportunity for data-mining for ity measures have been proposed and individually evaluated, automated recommendations. There are now (May 2005) they have not been evaluated relative to each other in a large over 1,500,000 communities. real-world environment. We present an extensive empirical While there are many forms of recommender systems [3], comparison of six distinct measures of similarity for recom- we chose a collaborative filtering approach [13] based on mending online communities to members of the Orkut social overlapping membership of pairs of communities. We did network. We determine the usefulness of the different rec- not make use of semantic information, such as the descrip- ommendations by actually measuring users’ propensity to tion of or messages in a community (although this may be an visit and join recommended communities. We also exam- area of future work). Our recommendations were on a per- ine how the ordering of recommendations influenced user community, rather than a per-user basis; that is, all mem- selection, as well as interesting social issues that arise in bers of a given community would see the same recommen- recommending communities within a real social network. dations when visiting that community’s page. We chose this approach out of the belief, which was confirmed, that com- Categories and Subject Descriptors munity memberships were rich enough to make very useful recommendations without having to perform more compu- H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications— tationally intensive operations, such as clustering of users or data mining; H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: communities or computing nearest neighbor relations among Online Information Services; I.5 [Computing Methodolo- users. Indeed, Sarwar et al. have found such item-based al- gies]: Pattern Recognition gorithms to be both more efficient and successful than user- based algorithms [13]. By measuring user acceptance of rec- General Terms ommendations, we were able to evaluate the absolute and Algorithms, measurement, human factors relative utility of six different similarity measures on a large volume of data. Keywords Data mining, collaborative filtering, recommender system, 2. MEASURES OF SIMILARITY similarity measure, online communities, social networks The input data came from the membership relation M = {(u, c) | u ∈ U, c ∈ C} , where C is the set of communities 1. INTRODUCTION with at least 20 members and U the set of users belong- ing to at least one such community. When we began our The amount of information available online grows far faster experiment in May 2004, |C| = 19, 792, |U| = 181, 160, and than an individual’s ability to assimilate it. For example, |M| = 2, 144, 435. Table 1 summarizes the distribution. consider “communities” (user-created discussion groups) with- All of our measures of community similarity involve the in Orkut, a social-networking website (http://www.orkut.com) overlap between two communities, i.e., the number of com- Table 1: Distribution of community memberships min max median σ Copyright 2005ACM. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted Users per community 20 9077 50 230.5 here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. Communities per user 1 4173 6 28.0 The definitive version was published in KDD ’05, August 21-24, 2005 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1081870.1081956
  • 2. 2.1.3 Pointwise Mutual-Information: positive corre- mon users. If a base community b and a (potentially) related lations (MI1) community r are considered as sets of users, the overlap is |B ∩ R|, where we use capital letters to represent the set con- Information theory motivates other measures of correla- taining a community’s members. Note that overlap cannot tion, such as “mutual information” [2]. We chose pointwise be the sole factor in relatedness, as the size of communities mutual information where we only count “positive” corre- varies greatly. If we only considered overlap, practically ev- lations (membership in both B and R). Such a formulation ery community would be considered related to the “Linux” essentially focuses on how membership in one group is pre- community, which was the most popular, with 9,077 mem- dictive of membership in another (without considering how bers. The similarity measures in the next section normalize base non-membership in a group effects membership in an- the overlap in different ways. other group), yielding: 2.1 Similarity Measure Functions P(r, b) Each similarity measure we consider is presented as a (pos- M I1(b, r) = P(r, b) · lg P(r) · P(b) sibly asymmetric) function of b and r indicating how appro- priate the related community r is as a recommendation for 2.1.4 Pointwise Mutual-Information: positive and the base community b. We do not use the result of the negative correlations (MI2) function as an absolute measure of similarity, only to rank Similarly, we can compute the pointwise mutual infor- recommendations for a given base community. mation with both positive and negative correlations (e.g., 2.1.1 L1-Norm membership in both B and R, or non-membership in both groups). Again, we don’t compute the full expected mutual If we − consider the base and related communities to be → vectors b and − , where the ith element of a vector is 1 if → information, since we believe cross-correlations (e.g., how r membership in B affects non-membership in R) tend to be user i is a member and 0 if not, we can measure the overlap distortive with the recommendation task since such cross- as the product of their L1-norms: correlations are plentiful but not very informative. This −− →→ yields: → −− b·r L1( b , →) = r → − ·− → b r P(¯, ¯ 1 1 P(r, b) r b) + P(¯, ¯ · lg M I2(b, r) = P(r, b) · lg r b) This quantity can also be expressed in set notation, where P(¯) · P(¯ P(r) · P(b) r b) we use a capital letter to represent the set containing a com- 2.1.5 Salton (IDF) munity’s members: Salton proposed a measure of similarity based on inverse |B ∩ R| document frequency scaling (tf-idf) [12]: L1(B, R) = |B| · |R| Note that this evaluates to the overlap between the two IDF (b, r) = P (r|b) · (− lg P(r)) groups divided by the product of their sizes. When the base community is held constant (as when we determine the |B ∩ R| |R| · (− lg IDF (B, R) = ) base community’s recommendations), this evaluates to the |B| |U| overlap divided by the size of the related community, fa- 2.1.6 Log-Odds voring small communities. Kitts et al. [9] reported this to be a successful measure of similarity in their recommender We first considered the standard log-odds function, which system. measures the relative likelihood that presence or absence in a base community predicts membership in a related commu- 2.1.2 L2-Norm nity: Similarly, we can measure the overlap with the product of → − the L2-norms (“cosine distance” [3, 6, 12]) of b and →: − P(r|b) r LogOdds0(b, r) = lg P(r|¯ b) −− →→ Empirically, we found this generated the exact same rank- → −→ b·r L2( b , − ) = r − → ings as using the L1-Norm, which makes sense because: ·− → b r 2 2 In set notation: 1. Logarithm is monotonic and, while affecting scores, does not affect rankings. |B ∩ R| 2. Constant factors, such as |B|, do not affect rankings. L2(B, R) = |B| · |R| |U |, P(r|¯ ≈ P(r) 3. For |B| b) Note that the square-root in the denominator causes L2 to penalize large communities less severely than L1. We formulated a different log-odds metric, which measures Observe that the L2-norm presented here is equivalent to whether membership in the base community is likelier to the widely used cosine coefficient applied to binary data. predict membership or absence in the related community: Moreover, while Pearson correlation has been used previ- ously in recommender systems where ranking data is avail- P(r|b) able, we did not use this measure here since it is generally LogOdds(b, r) = lg P(¯|b) r considered inappropriate for binary data.
  • 3. top scores, leading to MI1 and IDF often giving the same Table 2: Average size of top-ranked community for ranking to top-scoring communities. (Note that this pertur- each measure bation quantity is given only to explain the high correlation between MI1 and IDF. Statistically, it is meaningless, since measure Average size b and ¯ cannot simultaneously hold.) b rank 1 rank 2 rank 3 L1 332 482 571 L2 460 618 694 3. EXPERIMENT DESIGN MI1 903 931 998 We designed an experiment to determine the relative value MI2 966 1003 1077 IDF 923 985 1074 of the recommendations produced by each similarity mea- LogOdds 357 513 598 sure. This involved interleaving different pairs of recommen- dations and tracking user clicks. Specifically, we measured the efficacy of different similarity measures using pair-wise binomial sign tests on click-through data rather than us- Table 3: Agreement in top-ranked results between ing traditional supervised learning measures such as preci- measures. For example, MI1 and IDF rank the same sion/recall or accuracy since there is no “true” labeled data related community first for 98% of base communi- for this task (i.e., we do not know what are the correct com- ties. Correlations greater than 85% are in bold. munities that should be recommended to a user). Rather, we focused on the task of determining which of the similar- L1 ity measures performs best on a relative performance scale .70 L2 with regard to acceptance by users. .41 .60 MI1 .39 .57 .96 MI2 3.1 Combination .41 .59 .98 .97 IDF .88 .79 .46 .44 .46 LogOdds When a user viewed a community page, we hashed the combined user and community identifiers to one of 30 val- ues, specifying an ordered pair of similarity measures to compare. Let S and T be the ordered lists of recommenda- 2.2 Discussion tions for the two measures, where S = (s1 , s2 , . . . , s|S| ) and For a given measure, we refer to the related community T = (t1 , t2 , . . . , t|T | ) and |S| = |T |. The recommendations of yielding the highest value to be the top-ranked related com- each measure are combined by Joachims’ “Combined Rank- munity relative to a base community. The average size ing” algorithm [7], restated in Figure 1. The resulting list is of top-ranked communities for each measure, which varies guaranteed to contain the top kS and kT recommendations greatly, is shown in Table 2. Table 3 shows how often two for each measure, where kT ≤ kS ≤ kT + 1 [7, Theorem 1]. functions yield the same top-ranking result. Table 4 shows 3.2 Measurements the top recommendations for the “I love wine” community. Note that MI1, MI2, and IDF favor very large communities, Whenever a user visited a community, two measures were while L1 and LogOdds favor small communities. chosen and their recommendations interleaved, as discussed Note that in addition to the obvious correlations between above. This was done in a deterministic manner so that the two mutual-information functions (96%), there is a very a given user always saw the same recommendations for a strong correlation between IDF and the mutual-information given community. To minimize feedback effects, we did not functions (97-98%). Manipulation of the formulas for MI1 regenerate recommendations after the experiment began. and IDF shows: A user who views a base community (e.g., “I love wine”) is either a member (denoted by “M”) or non-member (denoted P(r, b) = P(r, b) · lg M I1(b, r) by “n”). (We capitalize “M” but not “n” to make them eas- P(r) · P(b) ier to visually distinguish.) In either case, recommendations = P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r|b) − P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r) are shown. When a user clicks on a recommendation, there P(r|b)·P(b) · lg P(r|b) = are three possibilities: (1) the user is already a member of −P(r|b) · [1 − P(¯ · lg P(r) the recommended community (“M”), (2) the user joins the b)] recommended community (“j”), or (3) the user visits but P(r|b)·[P(b) · lg P(r|b) + P(r|b)·P(¯ · lg P(r)] = b) does not join the recommended community (“n”). The com- −P(r|b) · lg P(r) bination of base and related community memberships can be combined in six different ways. For example “M→j” denotes Substituting IDF (b, r) = −P (r|b) · lg P(r), we get: a click where a member of the base community clicks on a = P(r|b) · P(b) · lg P(r|b) + P(¯ · lg P(r) M I1(b, r) b) recommendation to another community to which she does not belong and joins that community. Traditionally, anal- +IDF (b, r) yses of recommender systems focus on “M→j”, also known P (¯ we can Since for virtually all communities b, P (b) b), informally as “if you like this, you’ll like that” or formally approximate: as “similarity” or “conversion”. “M→n” recommendations are considered distracters, having negative utility, since they M I1(b, r) ≈ IDF (b, r) + P(r|b) · P(¯ · lg P(r) b) waste a user’s time with an item not of interest. Before run- Thus, MI1 yields a ranking that can be thought of as start- ning the experiment, we decided that the measures should ing with the ranking of IDF and perturbing the score of each be judged on their “M→j” performance. element in the ranking by P(r|b) · P(¯ · lg P(r), which gener- b) Other interpretations are possible: “M→n” links could be ally is not great enough to change the relative ranking of the considered to have positive utility for any of the following
  • 4. Table 4: Top recommendations for each measure for the “I love wine” community, with each recommended community’s overlap with the base community and size. The size of “I love wine” is 2400. L1 L2 MI1 MI2 IDF LogOdds 1 Ice Wine Red Wine Japanese Japanese Japanese Japanese (Eiswein) (208/690) Food/Sushi Food/Sushi Food/Sushi Food/Sushi (33/51) Lovers Lovers Lovers Lovers (370/3206) (370/3206) (370/3206) (370/3206) 2 California Cheeses of the Red Wine Red Wine Photography Photography Pinot Noir World (208/690) (208/690) (319/4679) (319/4679) (26/41) (200/675) 3 Winery I love red Cheeses of the Cheeses of the Red Wine Linux Visitor - wine! World World (208/690) (299/9077) Worldwide (170/510) (200/675) (200/675) (44/74) Figure 1: Joachims’ “Combine Rankings” algorithm [7] ordered recommendation lists S = (s1 , s2 , . . . , s|S| ) and T = (t1 , t2 , . . . , t|T | ) where |S| = |T | Input: combine (S, T, 0, 0, ∅) Call: Output: combined ordered recommendation list D combine(S, T, ks , kt , D){ if (ks < |S| ∧ kt < |T |) if (ks = kt ) { if (S[ks + 1] ∈ D){D := D + S[ks + 1]; } / combine(S, T, ks + 1, kt , D); } else { if (T [kt + 1] ∈ D){D := D + T [kt + 1]; } / combine(S, T, ks , kt + 1, D); } } } Table 5: Clicks on recommendations, by membership status in the base and recommended communities, as counts and as percentages of total clicks. The last column shows the conversion rate, defined as the percentage j of non-members clicking on a related community who then joined it ( n+j ). membership in base community membership in recommended community M (member) n (non-member) j (join) total conversion rate M (member): number of clicks 36353 184214 212982 433549 54% percent of total clicks 4% 20% 24% 48% n (non-member): number of clicks 8771 381241 77905 467917 17% percent of total clicks 1% 42% 9% 52% total: number of clicks 45124 565455 290887 901466 34% percent of total clicks 5% 63% 32% 100%
  • 5. reasons: by measure L2 than measure L1, for example, we consid- ered it a “win” for L2 and a loss for L1. If both measures 1. As the user found the link sufficiently interesting to ranked it equally, the result was considered to be a tie. Ta- click on, it was of more utility than a link not eliciting ble 6 shows the outcomes of all clicks, with conversions by a click. members (“M→j”) and non-members of the base community (“n→j”) broken out separately. 2. The user is genuinely interested in the related com- We say that a measure dominates another if, in their pair- munity but does not want to proclaim her interest, as wise comparison, the former has more “wins”. For example, membership information is public and some communi- L2 dominates L1. This definition, combined with the data ties focus on taboo or embarrassing topics. For exam- in Table 6, yielded a total order (to our surprise) among ple, a recommendation given for the popular “Choco- the measures: L2, MI1, MI2, IDF, L1, LogOdds. The same late” community is “PMS”. Note that this effect is spe- total order occurred if only “n→j” clicks were considered. cific to social networks and not, for example, Usenet The order was different if all clicks were considered: L2, L1, groups, where the user’s list of communities is not re- MI1, MI2, IDF, LogOdds. vealed to other users. 4.2 Conversion rates Similarly, it is unclear how to value clicks from a base com- There was great variance in conversion rate by recom- munity that the user does not belong to. Does an “n→j” mended community. We examined the 93 recommended click indicate failure, since the base community was not communities that were clicked through to more than 1000 joined by the user, but the recommended community was, times. Unsurprisingly, the ten with the lowest conversion indicating a degree of dissimilarity? Or is it of positive rate all were about sex (e.g., Amateur Porn). Note that utility, since it helped a user find a community of interest? members of the base community were far more willing than For these reasons, we tracked all clicks, recording the user’s non-members to join, perhaps because they had already membership status in the base and recommended commu- shown their willingness to join a sex-related community. At nities for later analysis. (We did not track whether users the other extreme, none of the ten with the highest con- returned to communities in the future because of the log- version rate were sexual (e.g., Flamenco). Table 7 provides ging overhead that would be required.) selected data by each membership combination. Unsurpris- ingly, for all 93 base communities, members were more likely 3.3 User Interface than non-members to join the recommended community. On community pages, our recommendations were pro- 4.3 User comments vided in a table, each cell of which contained a recommended community’s name, optional picture, and link (Figure 2). Users were also able to submit feedback on related com- Recommendations were shown by decreasing rank from left munities. Most of the feedback was from users who wanted to right, top to bottom, in up to 4 rows of 3. For aesthetic recommendations added or removed. Some complained a- reasons, we only showed entire rows; thus, no recommen- bout inappropriate recommendations of sexual or political dations were displayed if there were fewer than 3. We also communities, especially if they found the displayed image provided a control that allowed users to send us comments offensive. A few objected to our generating related commu- on the recommendations. nity recommendations at all, instead of allowing community creators to specify them. In one case, poor recommenda- tions destroyed a community: The creator of a feminist sex- 4. RESULTS uality community disbanded it both because of the prurient We analyzed all accesses between July 1, 2004, to July 18, recommendations that appeared on her page and the disrup- 2004, of users who joined Orkut during that period. The sys- tive new members who joined as a result of recommendations tem served 4,106,050 community pages with recommenda- from such communities. We agreed with her that the recom- tions, which provides a lower bound on the number of views. mendations were problematic and offered to remove them. (Unfortunately, we could not determine the total number of While anecdotal, this example illustrates how a recommen- views due to browser caching.) There were 901,466 clicks on dation can have unanticipated consequences that cannot be recommendations, 48% by members of the base community, captured in simple statistical measures. (An informal dis- 52% by non-members (Table 5). Clicks to related communi- cussion of users’ behavior when we allowed them to choose ties to which the user already belonged were rare, accounting related communities can be found elsewhere [14].) for only 5% of clicks. The most common case was for a non- member of a base community to click through and not join 5. POSITIONAL EFFECTS a related community (42%). We defined conversion rate (also called precision) as the During the above experiment, we became curious how the percentage of non-members who clicked through to a com- relative placement of recommendations affected users’ selec- munity who then joined it. The conversion rate was three tions and performed a second experiment. times as high (54%) when the member belonged to the base 5.1 Design community (from which the recommendation came) than not (17%). After determining that L2 was the best measure of simi- larity, we recomputed the recommendations and studied the 4.1 Relative performance of different measures effect of position on click-through. While in our original We compared each measure pairwise against every other experiment we displayed up to 12 recommendations in de- measure by analyzing clicks of their merged recommenda- creasing rank, for this experiment we displayed up to 9 rec- tions. If the click was on a recommendation ranked higher ommendations in random order, again ensuring that each
  • 6. Table 6: The relative performance of each measure in pairwise combination on clicks leading to joins, divided by base community membership status, and on all clicks. Except where numbers appear in italics, the superioriority of one measure over another was statistically significant (p < .01) using a binomial sign test [10]. M→j n→j measures all clicks win equal loss win equal loss win equal loss L2 MI1 6899 2977 4993 2600 1073 1853 30664 12277 20332 L2 MI2 6940 2743 5008 2636 1078 1872 31134 11260 19832 L2 IDF 6929 2697 5064 2610 1064 1865 30710 11271 20107 L2 L1 7039 2539 4834 2547 941 1983 28506 13081 23998 L2 LogOdds 8186 1638 4442 2852 564 1655 34954 6664 18631 MI1 MI2 3339 9372 1855 1223 3401 683 14812 37632 7529 MI1 IDF 3431 8854 1891 1139 3288 629 14671 37049 7758 MI1 LogOdds 7099 3546 3341 2514 1213 1193 29837 13869 13921 MI1 L1 6915 1005 6059 2547 407 2338 27786 4308 29418 MI2 IDF 1564 11575 1031 533 4266 359 6003 47885 4490 MI2 LogOdds 6920 3959 3177 2484 1418 598 2881 15308 13188 MI2 L1 6830 950 6419 2383 362 2333 26865 3872 29864 IDF L1 6799 1006 6304 2467 392 2352 27042 4069 29755 IDF LogOdds 6691 3804 3096 2452 1378 1085 28224 15013 13330 L1 LogOdds 6730 518 5975 2521 108 2059 31903 2097 24431 Table 7: Conversion rates by status of membership in base community, for communities to which more than 1000 clicks on recommendations occurred. member of base community non-member of base community Related community M→M M→j M→j conversion rate n→M n→n n→M conversion rate 10 communities with highest conversion rates 583 2273 6984 75% 198 3454 2017 37% 10 communities with lowest conversion rates 326 1984 826 29% 68 26287 472 1.8% all 93 communities 13524 54415 52614 46% 3488 127819 19007 17% user always saw the same ordering of recommendations for formation, which we found more intuitive. For future work, a given community. By randomizing the position of recom- we would like to see how recommendations handpicked by mendations, we sought to measure ordering primacy effects community owners compare. in the recommendations as opposed to their ranked quality. Just as we can estimate communities’ similarity through common users, we can estimate users’ similarity through 5.2 Results common community memberships: i.e., user A might be similar to user B because they belong to n of the same com- We measured all 1,279,226 clicks on related community munities. It will be interesting to see whether L2 also proves recommendations from September 22, 2004, through Oc- superior in such a domain. We could also take advantage tober 21, 2004. Table 8 shows the relative likelihood of of Orkut’s being a social network [8], i.e., containing in- clicks on each position. When there was only a single row, formation on social connections between pairs of users. In the middle recommendation was clicked most, followed by addition to considering common community memberships, the leftmost, then rightmost recommendations, although the we could consider distance between users in the “friendship differences were not statistically significant. When there graph”. Users close to each other (e.g., friends or friends- were two or three rows, the differences were very significant of-friends) might be judged more likely to be similar than (p < .001), with preferences for higher rows. P-values were distant strangers, although some users might prefer the lat- computed using a Chi-Squared test comparing the observed ter type of link, since it would introduce them to someone click-through rates with a uniform distribution over all po- they would be unlikely to meet otherwise, perhaps from a sitions [10]. different country or culture. Similarly, friendship graph information can be taken into 6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE PLANS account when making community recommendations, which Orkut’s large number of community memberships and us- would require that recommendations be computed on a per- ers allowed us to evaluate the relative performance of six user (or per-clique), rather than per-community, basis. In different measures of similarity in a large-scale real-world such a setting, we could make community recommendations study. We are not aware of any comparable published large- based on weighted community overlap vectors where weights scale experiments. We were surprised that a total order are determined based on the graph distances of other com- emerged among the similarity measures and that L2 vec- munity members to a given user. This is a fertile area for tor normalization showed the best empirical results despite future work and yet another example of how the interaction other measures, such as log-odds and pointwise mutual in-
  • 7. Figure 2: Displays of recommendations for three different communities Table 8: The relative likelihood of clicks on link by position when there are (a) one, (b) two, or (c) three rows of three recommendations. (a) n=28108, p=.12 (b) n=24459, p<.001 (c) n=1226659, p<.001 1.00 1.01 .98 1.04 1.05 1.08 1.11 1.06 1.04 .97 .94 .92 1.01 .97 .99 1.01 .94 .87 of data mining and social networks is becoming an exciting [6] Harman, D. Ranking Algorithms. In W. B. Frakes and R. Baeza-Yates (ed.), Information Retrieval: Data Structures new research area [4] [11]. & Algorithms (chapter 14). Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA: Prentice Hall, 1992. 7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [7] Joachims, T. Evaluating Retrieval Performance Using This work was performed while Ellen Spertus was on sab- Clickthrough Data. In Proceedings of the SIGIR Workshop on Mathematical/Formal Methods in Information batical from Mills College and a visiting scientist at Google. Retrieval (2002). ACM Press, New York, NY. We are grateful to Patrick Barry, Alex Drobychev, Jen Fitz- [8] Kautz, H.; Selman, Bart; Shah, M. Referral Web: patrick, Julie Jalalpour, Dave Jeske, Katherine Lew, Marissa Combining Social Networks and Collaborative Filtering. Mayer, Tom Nielsen, Seva Petrov, Greg Reshko, Catherine Communications of the ACM 45(8) (March 1997). Rondeau, Adam Sawyer, Eric Sachs, and Lauren Simpson [9] Kitts, B.; Freed, D.; Vrieze, M. Cross-Sell: A Fast for their help on the Orkut project and to Corey Anderson, Promotion-Tunable Customer-Item Recommendation Alex Drobychev, Oren Etzioni, Alan Eustace, Keith Golden, Method based on Conditionally Independent Probabilities. In Proceedings of the Sixth ACM SIGKDD International Carrie Grimes, Pedram Keyani, John Lamping, Tom Nielsen, Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Peter Norvig, Kerry Rodden, Gavin Tachibana, and Yonatan (Boston, 2000). ACM Press, New York, NY, 437-446. Zunger for their help on this research or its exposition. [10] Lehmann, E.L. Testing Statistical Hypotheses (second edition). Springer-Verlag, 1986. 8. REFERENCES [11] Raghavan, P. Social Networks and the Web (Invited Talk). [1] Breese, J.; Heckerman, D.; Kadie, C. Empirical Analysis of In Advances in Web Intelligence: Proceedings of the Predictive Algorithms for Collaborative Filtering. In Second International Atlantic Web Intelligence Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty Conference, May 2004. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg. in Artificial Intelligence (Madison, Wisconsin, 1998). [12] Salton, G. Automatic Text Processing: The Morgan Kaufmann. Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of Information by [2] Cover, T.M., and Thomas, J.A. Elements of Information Computer. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, 1989. Theory. Wiley, New York, 1991. [13] Sarwar, B.; Karypis, G.; Konstan, J.; Reidl, J. Item-Based [3] Deshpande, M., and Karypis, G. Item-Based Top-N Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms. In Recommendation Algorithms. ACM Transactions on Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Information Systems 22(1) (January 2004), 143-177. World Wide Web (WWW10) (Hong Kong, 2001). ACM [4] Domingos, P. Prospects and Challenges for Press, New York, NY, 285-295. Multi-Relational Data Mining. ACM SIGKDD Exploration [14] Spertus, Ellen. Too Much Information. Orkut Media Newsletter 5(1) (July 2003). Selections, January 19, 2005. Available online at [5] Dumais, S.; Joachims, T.; Bharat, K.; Weigend, A. SIGIR “http://media.orkut.com/articles/0078.html”. 2003 Workshop Report: Implicit Measures of User Interests and Preferences. SIGIR Forum 37(2) (Fall 2003).