Collaborative filtering based on multiple attribute decision making

ABSTRACT To address the sparsity problem, a novel collaborative filtering approach based on multiple attribute decision making (MADM-CF) is proposed. In MADM-CF, users in collaborative filtering are treated as decision alternatives, items are treated as attributes. The weight of each item is determined, and the preference similarities between the active user and other users are computed. The preference similarity means that how the users’ preferences are similar on positive ratings and negative ratings. According to the preference similarities, the candidate neighbourhood of the active user is determined. A method to compute overall assessment value is designed, the overall assessment value of each user in the candidate neighbourhood is computed, and users with the smallest overall assessment values are selected as the active user’s nearest neighbours. Finally, the most frequent item recommendation method (MFIR) is used to provide top-N recommendations to the active user. Experimental results based on MovieLens and Netflix datasets show that the proposed approach is superior to existing alternatives.