@conference {margaris_iisa2019_VNNs,
	title = {Improving Collaborative Filtering{\textquoteright}s Rating Prediction Coverage in Sparse Datasets through the Introduction of Virtual Near Neighbors},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA2019)},
	year = {2019},
	month = {jul},
	abstract = {Collaborative filtering creates personalized recommendations by considering ratings entered by users. Collaborative filtering algorithms initially detect users whose likings are alike, by ex-ploring the similarity between ratings that have insofar been submitted. Users having a high degree of similarity regarding their ratings are termed near neighbors, and in order to formu-late a recommendation for a user, her near neighbors{\textquoteright} ratings are extracted and form the basis for the recommendation. Col-laborative filtering algorithms however exhibit the problem commonly referred to as {\textquotedblleft}gray sheep{\textquotedblright}: this pertains to the case where for some users no near neighbors can be identified, and hence no personalized recommendations can be computed. The {\textquotedblleft}gray sheep{\textquotedblright} problem is more severe in sparse datasets, i.e. datasets where the number of ratings is small, compared to the number of items and users. In this paper, we address the {\textquotedblleft}gray sheep{\textquotedblright} problem by introducing the concept of virtual near neighbors and a related algorithm for their creation on the basis of the existing ones. We evaluate the proposed algorithm, which is termed as CFVNN, using eight widely used datasets and consid-ering two correlation metrics which are widely used in Collabo-rative Filtering research, namely the Pearson Correlation Coef-ficient and the Cosine Similarity. The results show that the pro-posed algorithm considerably leverages the capability of a Col-laborative Filtering system to compute personalized recommen-dations in the context of sparse datasets, tackling thus efficiently the {\textquotedblleft}gray sheep{\textquotedblright} problem. In parallel, the CFVNN algorithm achieves improvements in rating prediction quality, as this is expressed through the Mean Absolute Error and the Root Mean Square Error metrics.},
	keywords = {collaborative filtering, Cosine Similarity, Evaluation, Pearson Correlation Coefficient, Sparse Datasets, Virtual Near Neighbors},
	author = {Dionisis Margaris and Dionysios Vasilopoulos and Costas Vassilakis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos}
}
