A two-step Recommendation Algorithm via Iterative Local Least Squares
This is an incremental improvement for recommender systems, potentially aiding in addressing cold-start problems for inactive users.
The paper tackles the data sparsity problem in recommender systems by proposing a two-step algorithm using iterative local least squares (ILLS) to estimate missing values, which enhances AUC accuracy on datasets like MovieLens, Netflix, and RYM, particularly in dense datasets.
Recommender systems can change our life a lot and help us select suitable and favorite items much more conveniently and easily. As a consequence, various kinds of algorithms have been proposed in last few years to improve the performance. However, all of them face one critical problem: data sparsity. In this paper, we proposed a two-step recommendation algorithm via iterative local least squares (ILLS). Firstly, we obtain the ratings matrix which is constructed via users' behavioral records, and it is normally very sparse. Secondly, we preprocess the "ratings" matrix through ProbS which can convert the sparse data to a dense one. Then we use ILLS to estimate those missing values. Finally, the recommendation list is generated. Experimental results on the three datasets: MovieLens, Netflix, RYM, suggest that the proposed method can enhance the algorithmic accuracy of AUC. Especially, it performs much better in dense datasets. Furthermore, since this methods can improve those missing value more accurately via iteration which might show light in discovering those inactive users' purchasing intention and eventually solving cold-start problem.