Iterative Collaborative Ranking of Customers and Providers

Abstract

This paper introduces a new application: predicting the Internet provider-customer market. We cast the problem in the collaborative filtering framework, where we use current and past customer-provider relationships to compute for each Internet customer a ranking of potential future service providers. Furthermore, for each Internet service provider (ISP), we rank potential future customers. We develop a novel iterative ranking algorithm that draws inspiration from several sources, including collaborative filtering, webpage ranking, and kernel methods. Further analysis of our algorithm shows that it can be formulated in terms of an affine eigenvalue problem. Experiments on the actual Internet customer-provider data show promising results.