Information recommendation using ICA

We describe an information filtering system using independent component analysis (ICA). A document–word matrix is generally sparse and has an ambiguity of synonyms. To solve this problem, we propose a method to use document vectors represented by independent components. An independent component generated by ICA is considered as a topic. In practice, we map the document vectors into a topics space. Since some independent components are useless for recommendation, we select the necessary components from all independent components by a maximum distance algorithm (MDA). Although Euclidean distance is usually used by MDA, we propose topic selection by cosine-distance-based MDA to solve the mismatch of similarities in information filtering. We create a user profile from the transformed data with a genetic algorithm (GA). Finally, we recommend documents with the user profile and evaluate the accuracy by imputation precision. We have carried out an evaluation experiment to confirm the practicality of the proposed method.This work was presented, in part, at the 9th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 28–30, 2004