A new approach for combining content-based and collaborative filters

Abstract

With the development of e-commerce and the proliferation of easily accessible information, recommender systems have become a popular technique to prune large information spaces so that users are directed toward those items that best meet their needs and preferences. A variety of techniques have been proposed for performing recommendations, including content-based and collaborative techniques. Content-based filtering selects information based on semantic content, whereas collaborative filtering combines the opinions of other users to make a prediction for a target user. In this paper, we describe a new filtering approach that combines the content-based filter and collaborative filter to capitalize on their respective strengths, and thereby achieves a good performance. We present a series of recommendations on the selection of the appropriate factors and also look into different techniques for calculating user-user similarities based on the integrated information extracted from user profiles and user ratings. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our approach and compare it with classic filters, the result of which demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.