Title: Measuring the Eccentricity of Items,
Abstract: The long-tail phenomenon tells us that there are many items in the tail.
However, not all tail items are the same. Each item acquires different kinds of
users. Some items are loved by the general public, while some items are
consumed by eccentric fans. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, item
eccentricity, to incorporate this difference between consumers of the items.
Eccentric items are defined as items that are consumed by eccentric users. We
used this metric to analyze two real-world datasets of music and movies and
observed the characteristics of items in terms of eccentricity. The results
showed that our defined eccentricity of an item does not change much over time,
and classified eccentric and noneccentric items present significantly distinct
characteristics. The proposed metric effectively separates the eccentric and
noneccentric items mixed in the tail, which could not be done with the previous
measures, which only consider the popularity of items.