Challenging the Long Tail Recommendation

Understand

The success of "infinite-inventory" retailers such as Amazon.com and Netflix has been largely attributed to a "long tail" phenomenon.

• Although the majority of their inventory is not in high demand, these niche products, unavailable at limited-inventory competitors, generate a significant fraction of total revenue in aggregate.
• In addition, tail product availability can boost head sales by offering consumers the convenience of "one-stop shopping" for both their mainstream and niche tastes.
• However, most of existing recommender systems, especially collaborative filter based methods, can not recommend tail products due to the data sparsity issue.