Improving Existing Collaborative Filtering Recommendations via Serendipity-Based Algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, we study how to address the sparsity, accuracy and serendipity issues of top-N recommendation with collaborative filtering (CF). Existing studies commonly use rated items (which form only a small section in a rating matrix) or import some additional information (e.g., details about the items and users) to improve the performance of CF. Unlike these methods, we propose a novel notion towards a huge amount of unrated items: serendipity item. By utilizing serendipity items, we propose concise satisfaction and interest injection (CSII), a method that can effectively find interesting, satisfying, and serendipitous items in unrated items. By preventing uninteresting and unsatisfying items to be recommended as top-N items, this concise-but-novel method improves accuracy and recommendation quality (especially serendipity) substantially. Meanwhile, it can address the sparsity and cold-start issues by enriching the rating matrix in CF without additional information. As our method tackles rating matrix before recommendation procedure, it can be applied to most existing CF methods, such as item-based CF, user-based CF and matrix factorization-based CF. Through comprehensive experiments using abundant real-world datasets with LensKit implementation, we successfully demonstrate that our solution improves the performance of existing CF methods consistently and universally. Moreover, comparing with baseline methods, CSII can extract uninteresting items more carefully and cautiously, avoiding potential items inferred by mistake.