A hybrid approach with collaborative filtering for recommender systems

Abstract

The proliferation of powerful smart devices is revolutionizing mobile computing systems. A particular set of applications that is gaining wide interest is recommender systems. Recommender systems provide their users with recommendations on variety of personal and relevant items or activities. They can play a significant role in today's life whether in E-commerce or for daily decisions that we need to make. We introduce a hybrid approach for solving the problem of finding the ratings of unrated items in a user-item ranking matrix through a weighted combination of user-based and item-based collaborative filtering. The proposed technique provides improvements in addressing two major challenges of recommender systems: accuracy of recommender systems and sparsity of data by simultaneously incorporating users' correlations and items ones. The evaluation of the system shows superiority of the solution compared to stand-alone user-based collaborative filtering or item-based collaborative filtering.