An improved hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm based on tags and time factor
Chunxia Zhang, Ming Yang, Jing Lv, Wanqi Yang · Big Data Mining and Analytics · 2018
The Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommendation algorithm, one of the most popular algorithms in Recommendation Systems (RS), mainly includes memory-based and model-based methods. When performing rating prediction using a memory-based method, the approach used to measure the similarity between users or items can significantly influence the recommendation performance. Traditional CFs suffer from data sparsity when making recommendations based on a rating matrix, and cannot effectively capture changes in user interest. In this paper, we propose an improved hybrid collaborative filtering algorithm based on tags and a time factor (TT-HybridCF), which fully utilizes tag information that characterizes users and items. This algorithm utilizes both tag and rating information to calculate the similarity between users or items. In addition, we introduce a time weighting factor to measure user interest, which changes overtime. Our experimental results show that our method alleviates the sparsity problem and demonstrates promising prediction accuracy.