Improving Collaborative Filtering’s Rating Prediction Accuracy by Considering Users’ Rating Variability

Dionisis Margaris and Costas Vassilakis
Proceedings of The Fourth IEEE International Conference on Big Data Intelligence and Computing (DataCom 2018)

Abstract:
When rating predictions are computed in user-user collaborative filtering, each individual rating is typically adjusted by the mean of the ratings entered by the specific user. This practice takes into account the fact that users follow different rating practices, in the sense that some are stricter when rating items, while others are more lenient. However, users’ rating practices may also differ in rating variability, in the sense that some user may be entering ratings close to her mean, while another user may be entering more extreme ratings, close to the limits of the rating scale. In this work, we (1) propose an algorithm that considers users’ ratings variability in the rating prediction computation process, aiming to improve rating prediction quality and (2) evaluate the proposed algorithm against seven widely used datasets considering three widely used variability measures and two user similarity metrics. The proposed algorithm, using the “mean absolute deviation around the mean” variability measure, has been found to intro-duce considerable gains in rating prediction accuracy, in every dataset and under both user similarity metrics tested.

Note: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Year: 
Research area: