Effects of neighborhood-based collaborative filtering parameters on their blockbuster bias performances

Collaborative filtering algorithms are efficient tools for providing recommendations with reasonable accuracy performances to individuals. However, the previous research has realized that these algorithms are undesirably biased towards blockbuster items. i.e., both popular and highly-liked items, in their recommendations, resulting in recommendation lists dominated by such blockbuster items. As one most prominent types of collaborative filtering approaches, neighborhood-based algorithms aim to produce recommendations based on neighborhoods constructed based on similarities between users or items. Therefore, the utilized similarity function and the size of the neighborhoods are critical parameters on their recommendation performances. This study considers three well-known similarity functions, i.e., Pearson, Cosine, and Mean Squared Difference, and varying neighborhood sizes and observes how they affect the algorithms’ blockbuster bias and accuracy performances. The extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark data collections conclude that as the size of neighborhoods decreases, these algorithms generally become more vulnerable to blockbuster bias while their accuracy increases. The experimental works also show that using the Cosine metric is superior to other similarity functions in producing recommendations where blockbuster bias is treated more; however, it leads to having unqualified recommendations in terms of predictive accuracy as they are usually conflicting goals.