Performance Evaluation of Time-based Recommendation System in Collaborative Filtering Technique

Abstract

The Collaborative Filtering (CF) technique is the most common neighbourhood-based recommendation strategy, that provides personalized recommendation to a user for the items using a similarity measure. Hence, the selection of the appropriate similarity measure becomes crucial in the CF based recommendation system. The traditional similarity measures merely focus only on the historical ratings provided by the users to compute the similarity, completely ignoring the fact that preferences change over a period of time. Considering this, the paper aims to develop an effective Recommendation System that uses temporal information to capture the changes in the preferences over a period of time. For this, the existing exponential and power time decay functions are integrated with Cosine, Pearson Correlation, and Gower's similarity measures to compute similarity. The similarity is computed at the similarity computation and prediction levels of recommendation processes. Experimental findings in terms of MAE and RMSE on the MovieLens-100k demonstrate that performance of Gower's coefficient is better when applied with the exponential function at the similarity computation level of the recommendation process.