
Using Posters to Recommend Anime and Mangas in a Cold-Start Scenario - adulau
https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01584
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tekacs
> We propose BALSE (Blended Alternate Least Squares with Explanation), a new
> model for collaborative filtering

[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/balse](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/balse)

(for anyone who didn't spot the joke :) )

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stephengillie
Essentially, this is about creating alternative training data to "seed" a
recommender engine - if the engine has no previous data about a video series,
what other data (cover art) can be used to recommend a given viewer to watch
or not watch?

Is a recommender a type of Machine Learning?

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huac
yes, recommendation systems are a very vibrant branch of machine learning.

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jilljennV
Co-author here. We will provide our dataset for the sake of reproducibility,
in the meantime we strongly encourage you to compete to our ongoing Mangaki
Data Challenge, organized with Kyoto University:
[http://research.mangaki.fr/2017/07/18/mangaki-data-
challenge...](http://research.mangaki.fr/2017/07/18/mangaki-data-challenge-
en/) Deadline October 1.

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RaitoBezarius
Co-author here, feel free to ask any question!

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cm2012
Can someone eli5?

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huac
(skimmed paper)

The classic recommendation problem is the following: given a user and the
items (mangas) that they like, out of some universe of items (mangas), how can
we recommend new items (mangas) that they are also likely to enjoy? Typically
this is done via collaborative filtering or some other method, i.e. people who
like the same mangas as the original user also enjoy other mangas, so we
recommend these to the original user.

A very common problem occurs when you have a new or obscure manga, aka the
cold start problem. There are no reviews to use when finding similar mangas
(which is our input to the recommendation system). The authors propose
extracting visual information from the posters of these less commonly reviewed
mangas that finds characteristics of the manga. The theory is that users that
like mangas with 'girl with sword' will also like other mangas that have 'girl
with sword' or perhaps 'girl with bow' but probably not 'girl with book' (I
made these tags up).

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sillysaurus3
I'm not sure this would work in practice. The story is what matters, not the
visuals. Valvrave is good, Code Geass is amazing, but Girls Und Panzer sort of
sucks. Yet it looks visually similar.

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astrange
Gotta say I've never met anyone with these anime opinions before.

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nindalf
It's pretty non controversial to say that Code Geass is amazing. It's #16 in
the top 100 of MyAnimeList (anime equivalent of IMDb Top 250). As for Valvrave
and Girls Und Panzer they're rated 7.3 and 7.6 so it's perfectly possible that
someone might like one and not the other.

[1] -
[https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php](https://myanimelist.net/topanime.php)

