forgetting for recsys
xlvector
Sent to you by xlvector via Google Reader:
Before the digital age, remembering was costly and hard, and the default for humans was to forget. Forgetting is a good thing for a society, not least because people are willing to engage (they don’t fear the recall of trivial past deeds) and take better decisions (forgetting allows human decision-making to generalise and abstract from individual experiences). In the digital age, the balance has been inverted: remembering is cheaper and easier than forgetting. I was thinking about possible technological solutions that make forgetting a tiny bit easier than remembering in the digital world. So my question is: what if you had a recommender system in which you could specify the expiration date for each of your ratings? What would you do? Recommender system for online shopping might be a case in point (“past online purchases” are used to recommend items you might like). Forgetting might be useful for users who order birthday presents in that they might opt for short expiration dates for those purchases, so future recommendations for them would not be influenced by their purchases for somebody else. Any other practical idea is welcome!!! 
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