METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PARTITIONING A PLURALITY OF ITEMS INTO GROUPS OF SIMILAR ITEMS IN A RECOMMENDER OF SUCH ITEMS

摘要

A method and apparatus are disclosed for recommending items of interest to a user, such as television program recommendations, before a viewing history or purchase history of the user is available. A third party viewing or purchase history is processed to generate stereotype profiles that reflect the typical patterns of items selected by representative viewers. A user can select the most relevant stereotype(s) from the generated stereotype profiles and thereby initialize his or her profile with the items that are closest to his or her own interests. A clustering routine partitions the third party viewing or purchase history (the data set) into clusters using a k-means clustering algorithm, such that points (e.g., television programs) in one cluster are closer to the mean of that cluster than any other cluster. The value of k is incremented until (i) further incrementing of k does not yield any improvement in the classification accuracy, (ii) a predefined performance threshold is reached, or (iii) an empty cluster is detected.