An Improved Product Recommendation Method for Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) is the most commonly used technique for online recommendations. CF works by computing the interests of a user by gathering preferences or taste information of other users. In this technique, similar users or items are discovered by exploring the user-item rating matrix. Based on the computed similarity, a prediction is made for the unknown or new product. There are many similarity computation methods, such as the Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), Jaccard, Mean square difference, Cosine, etc. however, the accuracy of product recommendations using these methods is not very promising. This work introduces an improved product recommendation method for collaborative filtering, which is based on the triangle similarity. However, the downside of triangle similarity is that it only considers the common ratings of users. The proposed similarity measure not only focuses on common ratings but also consider the ratings of those items that are not commonly rated from pairs of users. The obtained similarity is further complemented with the user rating preference (URP) behavior in giving rating preferences. To evaluate the accuracy, experiments are performed on the six commonly used datasets in the field of CF. Experimental results prove that the proposed similarity measure performs well as compared to the existing similarity measures.