An Efficient Collaborative Recommender System for Removing Sparsity Problem

Abstract

Recommender Systems is a special type of information filtering system which has become important in the information overloaded and strategic decision making environment. Recommender System is used to produce meaningful suggestions about new items for particular consumers. These recommendations may be based on the user profile or item ratings, facilitate the users to make decisions in multiple contexts, such as what items to buy, what online news to read or what music to listen. Recommender Systems helps their founders to increase profits by recommending items and attracting new consumers. Collaborative filtering technique recommends items basis of conclusion of opinions about various products by users of similar profile to the active user. This technique requires user-items-ratings matrix. Although this is the most mature and commonly implemented technique, it faces major problem of Data Sparsity problem. Sparsity Problem occurs as a result of lack of enough information when only a few of the total number of items are rated by the users. This produces a sparse user item matrix leads to weak recommendations. This paper presents a recommender system using collaborative filtering implemented with RapidMiner tool. The proposed recommendation system is designed with users’ similarity calculated by Sequence and Set Similarity Measure (S3M) with utilizing similarity upper approximation and a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) model based technique used for recommending ratings for removing sparsity.