Patent ID: 7987182

Claim:
A method for recommending items to a user, the method comprising: using an electronic processor to retrieve item descriptions from one or more data sources; transforming the item descriptions into a binary attribute format comprised of an attribute bit vector and one or more term numbers, wherein the attribute bit vector comprises a fixed set of attributes describing the item and the term numbers comprise a variable set of attributes describing the item; converting the item descriptions from the binary attribute format into a bit vector, wherein the bit vector comprises the information contained in the attribute bit vector and a term bit vector which comprises a subset of the information defined by the term numbers as determined by a term mapping process; identifying items of interest to a user by monitoring user actions; learning to recognize items of interest to a user by employing one or more machine learning techniques, wherein the bit vectors representing the items of interest serve as input to the machine learning technique; and recommending one or more items from a set of items based on ranking scores calculated by comparing the bit vectors of the one or more items with relevance values of similar items as determined and encoded by the machine learning technique.