A Predictive Algorithm using 2-way Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems

In recent years most of personalized recommender systems in electronic commerce utilize collaborative filtering algorithm in order to recommend more appropriate items. User-based collaborative filtering is based on the ratings of other users who have similar preferences to a user in order to predict the rating of an item that the user hasn't seen yet. This nay decrease the accuracy of prediction because the similarity between two users is computed with respect to the two users and only when an item has been rated by the users. In item-based collaborative filtering, the preference of an item is predicted based on the similarity between the item and each of other items that have rated by users. This method, however, uses the ratings of users who are not the neighbors of a user for computing the similarity between a pair of items. Hence item-based collaborative filtering may degrade the accuracy of a recommender system. In this paper, we present a new approach that a user's neighborhood is used when we compute the similarity between the items in traditional item-based collaborative filtering in order to compensate the weak points of the current item-based collaborative filtering and to improve the prediction accuracy. We empirically evaluate the accuracy of our approach to compare with several different collaborative filtering approaches using the EachMovie collaborative filtering data set. The experimental results show that our approach provides better quality in prediction and recommendation list than other collaborative filtering approaches.