Boosting the Item-Based Collaborative Filtering Model with Novel Similarity Measures

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most widely employed methodologies for recommender systems, has drawn undeniable attention due to its effectiveness and simplicity. Nevertheless, a few papers have been published on the CF-based item-based model using similarity measures than the user-based model due to the model's complexity and the time required to build it. Additionally, the substantial shortcomings in the user-based measurements when the item-based model is taken into account motivated us to create stronger models in this work. Not to mention that the common trickiest challenge is dealing with the cold-start problem, in which users' history of item-buying behavior is missing (i.e., new users) or items for which activity is not provided (i.e., new items). Therefore, our novel five similarity measures, which have the potential to solve sparse data, are developed to alleviate the impact of this important problem. Most importantly, a thorough empirical analysis of how the item-based model affects the CF-based recommendation system’s performance has also been a critical part of this work, which presents a benchmarking study for thirty similarity metrics. The MAE, MSE, and accuracy metrics, together with fivefold cross-validation, are used to properly assess and examine the influence of all considered similarity measures using the Movie-lens 100 K and Film Trust datasets. The findings demonstrate how competitive the proposed similarity measures are in comparison to their alternatives. Surprisingly, some of the top "state-of-the-art" performers (such as SMD and NHSM) have been unable to fiercely compete with our proposed rivals when utilizing the item-based model.