An improved similarity measure for collaborative filtering-based recommendation system

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF), a representative algorithm of recommendation systems, is a method of using information of the neighbors of active user. The main idea of CF is that users who agreed in the ratings of certain items are likely to agree again in new items. The degree to which the two users’ tendencies in the ratings of the co-rated items are consistent is measured using a similarity measure. Therefore, the similarity measure in CF plays a key role in the extraction of the representative neighbors. Studies on the improvement of similarity indicators for selecting representative neighbors are still ongoing. Recently, a new similarity measure, named OS, was proposed to enhance the recommendation performance by utilizing mathematical equations, such as the integral equation, system of linear differential equations, and non-linear systems. This study aims to understand the limitations of OS and overcome these limitations using the proposed method. In the proposed method, a sigmoid function was used to reflect preferences, such as the positive or negative sentiment of user ratings. In addition, to consider the absolute score difference, some of the formulas were modified, and finally, the performance improvement of the recommendation system was proved through experiments.