FHCC: A SOFT HIERARCHICAL CLUSTERING APPROACH FOR COLLABORATIVE FILTERING RECOMMENDATION

Recommendation becomes a mainstream feature in nowadays e-commerce because of its significant contributions in promoting revenue and customer satisfaction. Given hundreds of millions of user activity logs and product items, accurate and efficient recommendation is a challenging computational task. This paper introduces a new soft hierarchical clustering algorithm - Fuzzy Hierarchical Co-clustering (FHCC) algorithm, and applies this algorithm to detect user-product joint groups from users’ behavior data for collaborative filtering recommendation. Via FHCC, complex relations among different data sources can be analyzed and understood comprehensively. Besides, FHCC is able to adapt to different types of applications according to the accessibility of data sources by carefully adjust the weights of different data sources. Experimental evaluations are performed on a benchmark rating dataset to extract user-product co-clusters. The results show that our proposed approach provide more meaningful recommendation results, and outperforms existing item-based and user-based collaborative filtering recommendations in terms of accuracy and ranked position.