Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms

Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized recommendations for information, products or services during a live interaction. These systems, especially the k-nearest neighbor collabora-tive filtering based ones, are achieving widespread success on the Web. The tremendous growth in the amount of avail- A ble information and the number of visitors to Web sites in recent years poses some key challenges for recommender sys-tems. These are: Producing high quality recommendations, performing many recommendations per second for millions of users and items and achieving high coverage in the face of data sparsity. In traditional collaborative filtering systems the amount of work increases with the number of partici-pants in the system. New recommender system technologies are needed that can quickly produce high quality recom-mendations, even for very large-scale problems. To address these issues we have explored item-based collaborative fil-tering techniques. Item-based techniques first analyze the user-item matrix to identify relationships between different items, and then use these relationships to indirectly compute recommendations for users. In this paper we analyze different item-based recommen-dation generation algorithms. We look into different tech-niques for computing item-item similarities (e.g., item-item correlation vs. cosine similarities between item vectors) and different techniques for obtaining recommendations from them (e.g., weighted sum vs. regression model). Finally, we ex-perimentally evaluate our results and compare them to the basic k-nearest neighbor approach. Our experiments sug-gest that item-based algorithms provide dramatically better performance than user-based algorithms, while at the same time providing better quality than the best available user-based algorithms.