Recommendation systems make suggestions
about artifacts to a user. For instance, they may
predict whether a user would be interested in
seeing a particular movie. Social recomendation
methods collect ratings of artifacts from many individuals,
and use nearest-neighbor techniques to
make recommendations to a user concerning new
artifacts. However, these methods do not use the
significant amount of other information that is
often available about the nature of each artifact
-- such as cast lists or movie reviews, for example.
This paper presents an inductive learning
approach to recommendation that is able to use
both ratings information and other forms of information
about each artifact in predicting user
preferences. We show that our method outperforms
an existing social-filtering method in the
domain of movie recommendations on a dataset
of more than 45,000 movie ratings collected from
a community of over 250 users.