Memory-based Collaborative Filtering Algorithms Research Articles

Applying landmarks to enhance memory-based collaborative filtering

Memory-based Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been a widely used approach for personalised recommendation with considerable success in many applications. An important issue regarding memory-based CF lies in similarity computation: the sparsity of the rating matrix leads to similarity computations based on few co-rated items between users, resulting in high sensitive predictions. Additionally, the ‘sparse’ similarity computation has high computational cost, due to the dimensionality of the item space. In this paper, we pursue both these issues. We propose a new model to compute similarity by representing users (or items) through their distances to preselected users, named landmarks. Such user modelling allows the introduction of more ratings into similarity computations through transitive relations created by the landmarks. Unlike conventional memory-based CF, the proposal builds a new user space defined by distances to landmarks, avoiding sensitivity in similarity computations. Findings from our experiments show that the proposed modelling achieves better accuracy than the ‘sparse’ similarity representation in all tested datasets, and has also yielded competitive accuracy results against the compared model-based CF algorithms. Furthermore, the proposed implementation has beaten all compared methods in terms of computational performance, becoming a promising alternative to memory-based CF algorithms for large datasets.

A Web service QoS prediction approach based on time- and location-aware collaborative filtering

In QoS-based Web service recommendation, predicting quality of service (QoS) for users will greatly aid service selection and discovery. Collaborative filtering (CF) is an effective method for Web service selection and recommendation. CF algorithms can be divided into two main categories: memory-based and model-based algorithms. Memory-based CF algorithms are easy to implement and highly effective, but they suffer from a fundamental problem: inability to scale-up. Model-based CF algorithms, such as clustering CF algorithms, address the scalability problem by seeking users for recommendation within smaller and highly similar clusters, rather than within the entire database. However, they are often time-consuming to build and update. In this paper, we propose a time-aware and location-aware CF algorithms. To validate our algorithm, this paper conducts series of large-scale experiments based on a real-world Web service QoS data set. Experimental results show that our approach is capable of addressing the three important challenges of recommender systems---high quality of prediction, high scalability, and easy to build and update.

Evaluating collaborative filtering recommendations inside large learning object repositories

Collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms are techniques used by recommender systems to predict the utility of items for users based on the similarity among their preferences and the preferences of other users. The enormous growth of learning objects on the internet and the availability of preferences of usage by the community of users in the existing learning object repositories (LORs) have opened the possibility of testing the efficiency of CF algorithms on recommending learning materials to the users of these communities. In this paper we evaluated recommendations of learning resources generated by different well known memory-based CF algorithms using two databases (with implicit and explicit ratings) gathered from the popular MERLOT repository. We have also contrasted the results of the generated recommendations with several existing endorsement mechanisms of the repository to explore possible relations among them. Finally, the recommendations generated by the different algorithms were compared in order to evaluate whether or not they were overlapping. The results found here can be used as a starting point for future studies that account for the specific context of learning object repositories and the different aspects of preference in learning resource selection.