English

Revisiting Alternative Experimental Settings for Evaluating Top-N Item Recommendation Algorithms

Information Retrieval 2020-10-12 v1

Abstract

Top-N item recommendation has been a widely studied task from implicit feedback. Although much progress has been made with neural methods, there is increasing concern on appropriate evaluation of recommendation algorithms. In this paper, we revisit alternative experimental settings for evaluating top-N recommendation algorithms, considering three important factors, namely dataset splitting, sampled metrics and domain selection. We select eight representative recommendation algorithms (covering both traditional and neural methods) and construct extensive experiments on a very large dataset. By carefully revisiting different options, we make several important findings on the three factors, which directly provide useful suggestions on how to appropriately set up the experiments for top-N item recommendation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.04484,
  title  = {Revisiting Alternative Experimental Settings for Evaluating Top-N Item Recommendation Algorithms},
  author = {Wayne Xin Zhao and Junhua Chen and Pengfei Wang and Qi Gu and Ji-Rong Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.04484},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T19:12:14.292Z