Qualitative analysis of user-based and item-based prediction algorithms for recommendation agents

Recommendation agents employ prediction algorithms to provide users with items that match their interests. In this paper, several prediction algorithms are described and evaluated, some of which are novel in that they combine user-based and item-based similarity measures derived from either explicit or implicit ratings. Both statistical and decision-support accuracy metrics of the algorithms are compared against different levels of data sparsity and different operational thresholds. The first metric evaluates the accuracy in terms of average absolute deviation, while the second evaluates how effectively predictions help users to select high-quality items. The experimental results indicate better performance of item-based predictions derived from explicit ratings in relation to both metrics. Category-boosted predictions lead to slightly better predictions when combined with explicit ratings, while implicit ratings, in the context that have been defined in this paper, perform much worse than explicit ratings. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.