Feature-based prediction of unknown preferences for nearest-neighbor collaborative filtering

Recommendation systems analyze user preferences and recommend items to a user by predicting the user´s preference for those items. Among various kinds of recommendation methods, collaborative filtering (CF) has been widely used and successfully applied to practical applications. However, collaborative filtering has two inherent problems: data sparseness and the cold-start problems. In this paper, we propose a method of integrating additional feature information of users and items into CF to overcome the difficulties caused by sparseness and improve the accuracy of recommendation. Several experimental results that show the effectiveness of the proposed method are also presented.