Walk the talk: analyzing the relation between implicit and explicit feedback for preference elicitation

Most of the approaches for understanding user preferences or taste are based on having explicit feedback from users. However, in many real-life situations we need to rely on implicit feedback such as the amount of times a user has bought an item or listened to a song. To analyze the relation between implicit and explicit feedback, we conduct a user experiment in the music domain. We find that there is a strong relation between implicit feedback and ratings. We analyze the effect of context variables on the ratings and find that recentness – i.e. time elapsed since the user interacted with the item – has a significant effect. We also analyze several user variables and conclude that the way that the user interacts with the items also affects the ratings. Finally, we propose a simple linear model that relates these variables to the rating we can expect to an item. Such mapping would allow to easily adapt any existing approach that uses explicit feedback to the implicit case. 1