Item Genre-Based Users Similarity Measure for Recommender Systems

Abstract

A technique employed by recommendation systems is collaborative filtering, which predicts the item ratings and recommends the items that may be interesting to the user. Naturally, users have diverse opinions, and only trusting user ratings of products may produce inaccurate recommendations. Therefore, it is essential to offer a new similarity measure that enhances recommendation accuracy, even for customers who only leave a few ratings. Thus, this article proposes an algorithm for user similarity measures that exploit item genre information to make more accurate recommendations. This algorithm measures the relationship between users using item genre information, discovers the active user’s nearest neighbors in each genre, and finds the final nearest neighbors list who can share with them the same preference in a genre. Finally, it predicts the active-user rating of items using a definite prediction procedure. To measure the accuracy, we propose new evaluation criteria: the rating level and reliability among users, according to rating level. We implement the proposed method on real datasets. The empirical results clarify that the proposed algorithm produces a predicted rating accuracy, rating level, and reliability between users, which are better than many existing collaborative filtering algorithms.

Keywords

• accuracy
• collaborative filtering
• reliability
• similarity measure