Collaborative filtering

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Definition

Collaborative Filtering(CF) refers to the use of software algorithms for narrowing down a large set of choices by using collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, and data sources.

Overview

The term Collaborative Filtering was first coined by the makers of one of the earliest recommendation systems, Tapestry. The basic assumption in CF is that user A and user B's personal tastes are correlated if both users rate n items similarly.

Collaborative Filtering systems follow this approach to produce recommendations:
1. Gather ratings from users and maintain user's ratings in a database.
2. Compute the correlations between pairs of users to determine a user’s neighbors in taste space
3. Compute the ratings of these neighbors to make recommendations.

Collaborative Filtering requires ratings for an item in order to make a prediction for it. (Novelty and serendipity,accuracy and coverage).Unlike Content filtering, Collaborative filtering does not require content; instead, CF requires ratings for an item to make a prediction for it.(RS)

Collaborative Filtering Techniques

Collaborative Filtering techniques can be separated into 3 classes:

1. Memory-based(Heuristic) Recommendation Technique

Memory-based algorithms make predictions by operating on data (users, items and ratings) stored in memory. Nearest neighbor algorithms are the most commonly used CF algorithms. Users similar to the current user with respect to preferences are called as neighbors. Nearest neighbor algorithms can be further classified into User-based nearest neighbor and Item-based nearest neighbor algorithms.

User-based nearest neighbor algorithms generate predictions for a given user based on ratings provided by users in the neighborhood. A common approach to user-based nearest neighbor algorithm is:
1. Weight all users with respect to similarity with the current user. Similarity weighting is done by either using:

• Pearson correlation coefficient between ratings for current user c, and another user, u.
  
• Cosine-based correlation where in the two users c and u are considered to be two vectors in an m-dimensional space and the similarity between the two is measured by computing the cosine of the angle between them.
  

2. Select a subset of the users (neighbors) to use as predictors.

• Neighbor selection is done by finding similar users or users having a similarity weighting above a certain threshold.
  

3. Normalize ratings and compute a prediction from a weighted combination of the selected neighbors’ ratings.
4. Present items with highest predicted ratings as recommendations.

Item-based algorithms generate predictions based on similarities between items.
(Refer 3.3 421425 for top N) 1. The correlation of each item i_k with other items is computed.
2. For each user u_i , the ratings of the items highly correlated with i_k are aggregated.

Advantages of Memory-based algorithms:
1. It is easy to implement.
2. It can detect complex patterns easily.
3. It scales well with correlated items.
4. It does not require the content of items, only the ratings are sufficient.
5. New data can be added easily.

Disadvantages of Memory-based algorithms:
1. It depends on human ratings.
2. Correlations are skewed when data is sparse.
3. Time and memory requirements increase linearly with the number of users and ratings.
4. It cannot recommend for new users and items.

Challenges of Collaborative Filtering

• Data sparsity (421425 all)
• Scalability
• Synonymy
• Gray Sheep
• Shilling

Collaborative Filtering in e-commerce

Cf algorithms are employed in several popular websites such as:

• Amazon
• Netflix
• eBay
• Google News
• Hulu
• Internet Movie Database