Benchmarking Explicit Rating Prediction Algorithms for Cosmetic Products

Recommendation systems have become a staple feature for any e-commerce sites. The ability to predict whether a customer likes an unseen product forms the very foundation of a recommendation system. In this paper, we concern the issue of explicit rating prediction over cosmetic products. Given a dataset of cosmetic product ratings, we analyze the characteristics of the dataset and implement a wide range of algorithms, such as KNN and matrix factorization, to predict such ratings. We evaluate the performance of these algorithms using MAE and RMSE measures, and discuss factors that may contribute to their performance results. Our experiments have shown that the SVD++ technique performs the best among all with an MAE of 0.7699 and an RMSE of 0.9696. We hope that our paper can shed new light on the selection of explicit rating prediction algorithms not only in the domain of beauty products, but also in wider scenarios.