A Modified Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering Algorithm based on a New User Similarity Measure

Data sparsity remains to be a critical concern for recommendation systems since it results in low accuracy and poor recommendation quality. To address this problem, collaborative filtering techniques based on user similarity have been applied but existing implementations have not been shown to sufficiently address the problem of data sparsity. Thus, this paper presents an enhanced memory-based collaborative filtering algorithm utilizing a new similarity measure that identifies co-rated items and computes user similarity to overcome the data sparsity problem and improve the recommendation quality which can be adopted for various applications. Results of the study show that the use of the new similarity measure has improved the determination of user similarity than when using the traditional Cosine, Euclidean Distance, and Pearson Correlation similarity metrics.