Nearest neighbors algorithm and genetic‐based collaborative filtering

Abstract

AbstractConventional recommender systems often utilize similarity formulas to identify similarities between active users and others to predict the rating of the unseen items. Existing optimization algorithms seek to find the weights and coefficients affecting these similarities. Our proposed method, implemented in R in the GACFF package, shifts away from this view and directly uses the continuous genetic algorithm to find optimal similarities in big data (e.g., Movielens 1M and Netflix datasets) to improve the performance of user‐based collaborative filtering recommendation systems. First, by identifying the users who are the nearest neighbors along with their number, the number of genes in a chromosome is determined. Each gene represents the similarity between a neighboring user and an active user. This genetic algorithm is independent of the size of the data. Our method provides optimal solutions more quickly by estimating the starting points. Moreover, the genetic metric provides better results and recommendations than previous ones in terms of runtime and quality measures (i.e., mean absolute error, coverage, precision, and recall).