A machine learning recommender system based on collaborative filtering using Gaussian mixture model clustering

With the shift toward online shopping, it has become necessary to customize customers' needs and give them more choices. Before making a purchase, buyers research the products' features. The recommender systems facilitate the search task for customers by narrowing down the search space within specific products that align with the customer's needs. A recommender system uses clustering to filter information, calculating the similarity between members of a cluster to determine the factors that will lead to more accurate predictions. We propose a new method for predicting scores in machine learning recommender systems using the Gaussian mixture model clustering and the Pearson correlation coefficient. The proposed method is applied to MovieLens data. The results are then compared to three commonly used methods: Pearson correlation coefficients, K-means, and fuzzy C-means algorithms. As a result of increasing the number of neighbors, our method shows a lower error than others. Additionally, the results depict that accuracy will increase as the number of users increases. Our model, for instance, is 5% more accurate than existing methods when the neighbor size is 30. Gaussian mixture clustering chooses similar users and takes into account the scores distance when choosing nearby users that are similar to the active user.