A New Item-Based Collaborative Filtering Algorithm to Improve the Accuracy of Prediction in Sparse Data

In memory-based collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms, the similarity and prediction method have a significant impact on the recommendation results. Most of the existing recommendation techniques have improved different similarity measures to alleviate inaccurate similarity results in sparse data, however, ignored the impact of sparse data on prediction results. To enhance the adaptability to sparse data, we propose a new item-based CF algorithm, which consists of the item similarity measure based vague sets and item-based prediction method with the new neighbor selection strategy. First, in the stage of similarity calculation, the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence based on vague sets is proposed from the perspective of user preference probability to measure item similarity. Following this, the impact of rating quantity is further considered to improve the accuracy of similarity results. Next, in the prediction stage, we relax the limit of depending on explicitly ratings and integrate more rating information to adjust prediction results. Experimental results on benchmark data sets show that, compared with other representative algorithms, our algorithm has better prediction and recommendation quality, and effectively alleviates the data sparseness problem.