Title
Mitigating Data Sparsity Using Similarity Reinforcement-Enhanced Collaborative Filtering.
Abstract
The data sparsity problem has attracted significant attention in collaborative filtering-based recommender systems. To alleviate data sparsity, several previous efforts employed hybrid approaches that incorporate auxiliary data sources into recommendation techniques, like content, context, or social relationships. However, due to privacy and security concerns, it is generally difficult to collect such auxiliary information. In this article, we focus on the pure collaborative filtering methods without relying on any auxiliary data source. We propose an improved memory-based collaborative filtering approach enhanced by a novel similarity reinforcement mechanism. It can discover potential similarity relationships between users or items by making better use of known but limited user-item interactions, thus to extract plentiful historical rating information from similar neighbors to make more reliable and accurate rating predictions. This approach integrates user similarity reinforcement and item similarity reinforcement into a comprehensive framework and lets them enhance each other. Comprehensive experiments conducted on several public datasets demonstrate that, in the face of data sparsity, our approach achieves a significant improvement in prediction accuracy when compared with the state-of-the-art memory-based and model-based collaborative filtering algorithms.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3062179
ACM Trans. Internet Techn.
Keywords
Field
DocType
Recommender system,rating prediction,personalization,data sparsity,similarity reinforcement
Recommender system,Data source,Data mining,Social relationship,Collaborative filtering,Information retrieval,Computer science,Artificial intelligence,Reinforcement,Machine learning,Personalization
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
17
3
1533-5399
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
49
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yan Hu1583.42
Weisong Shi22323163.09
Hong Li316037.11
Xiaohui Hu4178.10