  Recommending products to consumers means not only understanding their tastes,
but also understanding their level of experience. For example, it would be a
mistake to recommend the iconic film Seven Samurai simply because a user enjoys
other action movies; rather, we might conclude that they will eventually enjoy
it -- once they are ready. The same is true for beers, wines, gourmet foods --
or any products where users have acquired tastes: the `best' products may not
be the most `accessible'. Thus our goal in this paper is to recommend products
that a user will enjoy now, while acknowledging that their tastes may have
changed over time, and may change again in the future. We model how tastes
change due to the very act of consuming more products -- in other words, as
users become more experienced. We develop a latent factor recommendation system
that explicitly accounts for each user's level of experience. We find that such
a model not only leads to better recommendations, but also allows us to study
the role of user experience and expertise on a novel dataset of fifteen million
beer, wine, food, and movie reviews.
