Collaborative Filtering Ensemble for Personalized Name Recommendation

Out of thousands of names to choose from, picking the right one for your child is a daunting task. In this work, our objective is to help parents making an informed decision while choosing a name for their baby. We follow a recommender system approach and combine, in an ensemble, the individual rankings produced by simple collaborative filtering algorithms in order to produce a personalized list of names that meets the individual parents' taste. Our experiments were conducted using real-world data collected from the query logs of 'nameling' (nameling.net), an online portal for searching and exploring names, which corresponds to the dataset released in the context of the ECML PKDD Discover Challenge 2013. Our approach is intuitive, easy to implement, and features fast training and prediction steps.