Rec-CFSVD++: Implementing Recommendation System Using Collaborative Filtering and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)++

In recommender systems, Collaborative Filtering (CF) plays an essential role in promoting recommendation services. The conventional CF approach has limitations, namely data sparsity and cold-start. The matrix decomposition approach is demonstrated to be one of the effective approaches used in developing recommendation systems. This paper presents a new approach that uses CF and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)++ for implementing a recommendation system. Therefore, this work is an attempt to extend the existing recommendation systems by (i) finding similarity between user and item from rating matrices using cosine similarity; (ii) predicting missing ratings using a matrix decomposition approach, and (iii) recommending top-N user-preferred items. The recommender system’s performance is evaluated considering Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Performance evaluation is accomplished by comparing the systems developed using CF in combination with six different algorithms, namely SVD, SVD++, Co-Clustering, KNNBasic, KNNBaseline, and KNNWithMeans. We have experimented using MovieLens 100K, MovieLens 1M, and BookCrossing datasets. The results prove that the proposed approach gives a lesser error rate when cross-validation (CV={5,10,15}) is performed. The experimental results show that the lowest error rate is achieved with MovieLens 100K dataset (RMSE=0.9123, MAE=0.7149). The proposed approach also alleviates the sparsity and cold-start problems and recommends the relevant items.