Algorithm Selection for Recommender Systems via Meta-Learning on Algorithm Characteristics

Abstract

The Algorithm Selection Problem for recommender systems-choosing the best algorithm for a given user or context-remains a significant challenge. Traditional meta-learning approaches often treat algorithms as categorical choices, ignoring their intrinsic properties. Recent work has shown that explicitly characterizing algorithms with features can improve model performance in other domains. Building on this, we propose a per-user meta-learning approach for recommender system selection that leverages both user meta-features and automatically extracted algorithm features from source code. Our preliminary results, averaged over six diverse datasets, show that augmenting a meta-learner with algorithm features improves its average NDCG@10 performance by 8.83% from 0.135 (user features only) to 0.147. This enhanced model outperforms the Single Best Algorithm baseline (0.131) and successfully closes 10.5% of the performance gap to a theoretical oracle selector. These findings show that even static source code metrics provide a valuable predictive signal, presenting a promising direction for building more robust and intelligent recommender systems.