Evaluation of Item-Based Top-N Recommendation Algorithms

ABSTRACT

The explosive growth of the world-wide-web and the emergence of e-commerce has led to the development of recommender systems---a personalized information filtering technology used to identify a set of N items that will be of interest to a certain user. User-based Collaborative filtering is the most successful technology for building recommender systems to date, and is extensively used in many commercial recommender systems. Unfortunately, the computational complexity of these methods grows linearly with the number of customers that in typical commercial applications can grow to be several millions. To address these scalability concerns item-based recommendation techniques have been developed that analyze the user-item matrix to identify relations between the different items, and use these relations to compute the list of recommendations.In this paper we present one such class of item-based recommendation algorithms that first determine the similarities between the various items and then used them to identify the set of items to be recommended. The key steps in this class of algorithms are (i) the method used to compute the similarity between the items, and (ii) the method used to combine these similarities in order to compute the similarity between a basket of items and a candidate recommender item. Our experimental evaluation on five different datasets show that the proposed item-based algorithms are up to 28 times faster than the traditional user-neighborhood based recommender systems and provide recommendations whose quality is up to 27% better.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Information filtering

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
          Subjects: User profiles and alert services

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.4 Electronic Commerce
          Subjects: Electronic data interchange (EDI)

General Terms:
Algorithms, Economics, Performance

Keywords:
collaborative filtering, recommender system