Using Content Features to Enhance the Performance of User-Basedcollaborative Filtering

Abstract

Content-based and collaborative filtering methods are the most successful solutions in recommender systems. Content-based method is based on item’s attributes. This method checks the features of user's favourite items and then proposes the items which have the most similar characteristics with those items. Collaborative filtering method is based on the determination of similar items or similar users, which are called item-based and user-based collaborative filtering, respectively.In this paper we propose a hybrid method that integrates collaborative filtering and content-based methods. The proposed method can be viewed as user-based Collaborative filtering technique. However to find users with similar taste with active user, we used content features of the item under investigation to put more emphasis on user’s rating for similar items. In other words two users are similar if their ratings are similar on items that have similar context. This is achieved by assigning a weight to each rating when calculating the similarity of two users.We used movielens data set to access the performance of the proposed method in comparison with basic user-based collaborative filtering and other popular methods.