Recommendation opportunities

This paper proposes a novel method for estimating unknown ratings and recommendation opportunities and illustrates the practical implementation of the proposed approach by presenting a certain variation of the classical k-NN method in neighborhood-based collaborative filtering systems using weighted percentiles. We conduct an empirical study showing that the proposed method outperforms the standard user-based collaborative filtering approach by a wide margin in terms of item prediction accuracy and utility-based ranking metrics across various experimental settings. We also demonstrate that this performance improvement is not achieved at the expense of other popular performance measures, such as catalog coverage and aggregate diversity. The proposed approach can also be applied to other popular methods for rating estimation.