Integrating KNN and Gradient Boosting Decision Tree for Recommendation

Abstract

As an efficient information filtering tool, the recommendation system can help users obtain valuable information quickly and efficiently while effectively alleviating the information load problem. However, the classic collaborative filtering algorithm has data sparsity problems in practical applications, which affects the accuracy of recommendation. To solve this problem, this paper took movie recommendation as the research object and proposed a hybrid recommendation algorithm named K-GBDT which combined KNN and gradient boosting decision tree. Firstly, it used KNN to obtain the similar information of the target user and item for preliminary prediction. At the same time, it mined users' basic information features and potential features of users and items from the original data. Then, it tried to adopt XGBoost, LightGBM and CatBoost algorithm which were proposed base the idea of gradient boosting decision tree to build regression model. Finally, the target user's rating for the movie was predicted with the trained model, and the recommendation list was generated based on the predicted results. Compared with some classic recommendation algorithms such as NMF, Slope One, Co-Clustering and etc. Based on MovieLens datasets, results show that the mean absolute error and root mean square error of this algorithm are both low, and its recommendation accuracy is higher.