A collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm based on user clustering and item clustering

Personalized recommendation systems can help people to find interesting things and they are widely used with the development of electronic commerce. Many recommendation systems employ the collaborative filtering technology, which has been proved to be one of the most successful techniques in recommender systems in recent years. With the gradual increase of customers and products in electronic commerce systems, the time consuming nearest neighbor collaborative filtering search of the target customer in the total customer space resulted in the failure of ensuring the real time requirement of recommender system. At the same time, it suffers from its poor quality when the number of the records in the user database increases. Sparsity of source data set is the major reason causing the poor quality. To solve the problems of scalability and sparsity in the collaborative filtering, this paper proposed a personalized recommendation approach joins the user clustering technology and item clustering technology. Users are clustered based on users' ratings on items, and each users cluster has a cluster center. Based on the similarity between target user and cluster centers, the nearest neighbors of target user can be found and smooth the prediction where necessary. Then, the proposed approach utilizes the item clustering collaborative filtering to produce the recommendations. The recommendation joining user clustering and item clustering collaborative filtering is more scalable and more accurate than the traditional one. © 2010 ACADEMY PUBLISHER.