Recommending user generated item lists

Existing recommender systems mostly focus on recommending individual items which users may be interested in. User-generated item lists on the other hand have become a popular feature in many applications. E.g., Goodreads provides users with an interface for creating and sharing interesting book lists. These user-generated item lists complement the main functionality of the corresponding application, and intuitively become an alternative way for users to browse and discover interesting items to be consumed. Unfortunately, existing recommender systems are not designed for recommending user-generated item lists. In this work, we study properties of these user-generated item lists and propose a Bayesian ranking model, called LIRE for recommending them. The proposed model takes into consideration users' previous interactions with both item lists and with individual items. Furthermore, we propose in LIRE a novel way of weighting items within item lists based on both position of items, and personalized list consumption pattern. Through extensive experiments on a real item list dataset from Goodreads, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed LIRE model.