A Comprehensive Survey on Biclustering-based Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is achieving a plateau of high popularity. Still, recommendation success is challenged by the diversity of user preferences, structural sparsity of user-item ratings, and inherent subjectivity of rating scales. The increasing user base and item dimensionality of e-commerce and e-entertainment platforms creates opportunities, while further raising generalization and scalability needs. Moved by the need to answer these challenges, user-based and item-based clustering approaches for CF became pervasive. However, classic clustering approaches assess user (item) rating similarity across all items (users), neglecting the rich diversity of item and user profiles. Instead, as preferences are generally simultaneously correlated on subsets of users and items, biclustering approaches provide a natural alternative, being successfully applied to CF for nearly two decades and synergistically integrated with emerging deep learning CF stances. Notwithstanding, biclustering-based CF principles are dispersed, causing state-of-the-art approaches to show accentuated behavioral differences. This work offers a structured view on how biclustering aspects impact recommendation success, coverage, and efficiency. To this end, we introduce a taxonomy to categorize contributions in this field and comprehensively survey state-of-the-art biclustering approaches to CF, highlighting their limitations and potentialities.