Personalized recommendation algorithm based on preference features

Abstract

A hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm based on the user preferences and item features is proposed. A thorough investigation of Collaborative Filtering (CF) techniques preceded the development of this algorithm. The proposed algorithm improved the user-item similarity approach by extracting the item feature and applying various item features' weight to the item to confirm different item features. User preferences for different item features were obtained by employing user evaluations of the items. It is expected that providing better recommendations according to preferences and features would improve the accuracy and efficiency of recommendations and also make it easier to deal with the data sparsity. In addition, it is expected that the potential semantics of the user evaluation model would be revealed. This would explain the recommendation results and increase accuracy. A portion of the MovieLens database was used to conduct a comparative experiment among the proposed algorithms, i.e., the collaborative filtering algorithm based on the item and the collaborative filtering algorithm based on the item feature. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) was utilized to conduct performance testing. The experimental results show that employing the proposed personalized recommendation algorithm based on the preference-feature would significantly improve the accuracy of evaluation predictions compared to two previous approaches. © 1996-2012 Tsinghua University Press.