Improving the Prediction Quality in Memory-Based Collaborative Filtering Using Categorical Features

Despite years of evolution of recommender systems, improving prediction accuracy remains one of the core problems among researchers and industry. It is common to use side information to bolster the accuracy of recommender systems. In this work, we focus on using item categories, specifically movie genres, to improve the prediction accuracy as well as coverage, precision, and recall. We derive the user's taste for an item using the ratings expressed. Similarly, using the collective ratings given to an item, we identify how much each item belongs to a certain genre. These two vectors are then combined to get a user-item-weight matrix. In contrast to the similarity-based weight matrix in memory-based collaborative filtering, we use user-item-weight to make predictions. The user-item-weights can be used to explain to users why certain items have been recommended. We evaluate our proposed method using three real-world datasets. The proposed model performs significantly better than the baseline methods. In addition, we use the user-item-weight matrix to alleviate the sparsity problem associated with correlation-based similarity. In addition to that, the proposed model has a better computational complexity for making predictions than the k-nearest neighbor (kNN) method.