A fuzzy Bayesian approach to integrate user and item based collaborating filtering for enhanced recommendations
Vibhor Kant, Pragya Dwivedi · 2015
Memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) techniques have been widely implemented for predicting ratings to unseen items by aggregating ratings of similar users or items in recommender systems (RS). Usually, sufficient ratings from similar users or similar items are not available in the rating matrix, due to the data sparsity problem. Further, these techniques suffer from correlation based problems inherent in used similarity measures. Consequently, higher prediction accuracy cannot be achieved. In this paper, we propose the use of fuzzy Naïve Bayesian (FNB) classifier for user based CF and item based CF for implicitly computing similarity between users as well as items on the basis of conditional probabilities and develop fuzzy Naïve Bayesian classifier to user based CF (FNB-UB-CF) and item based CF (FNB-IB-CF). We further develop a hybrid RS (FNB-UB-IB-CF) by combining the proposed FNB-UB-CF and FNB-IB-CF. Their combinations would be helpful in alleviating the sparsity because both user ratings and item ratings are employed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods are indeed more robust against data sparsity and give better recommendation quality using a popular MovieLens dataset.