Power coefficient as a similarity measure for memory-based collaborative recommender systems

E-commerce systems employ recommender systems to enhance the customer loyalty and hence increasing the cross-selling of products. However, choosing appropriate similarity measure is a key to the recommender system success. Based on this measure, a set of neighbors for the current active user is formed which in turn will be used later to recommend unseen items to this active user. Pearson correlation coefficient, the most popular similarity measure for memory-based collaborative recommender system (CRS), measures how much two users are correlated. However, statistic's literature introduced many other coefficients for matching two sets (vectors) that may perform better than Pearson correlation coefficient. This paper explores Jaccard and Dice coefficients for matching users of CRS. A more general coefficient called a Power coefficient is proposed in this paper which represents a family of coefficients. Specifically. Power coefficient gives many degrees for emphasizing on the positive matches between users. However, CRS users have positive and negative matches and therefore these coefficients have to be modified to take negative matches into consideration. Consequently, they become more suitable for CRS research. Many experiments are carried out for all the proposed variants and are compared with the traditional approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed variants outperform Pearson correlation coefficient and cosine similarity measure as they are the most common approaches for memory-based CRS. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.