An effective collaborative filtering algorithm based on user preference clustering

Collaborative filtering is one of widely used recommendation approaches to make recommendation services for users. The core of this approach is to improve capability for finding accurate and reliable neighbors of active users. However, collected data is extremely sparse in the user-item rating matrix, meanwhile many existing similarity measure methods using in collaborative filtering are not much effective, which result in the poor performance. In this paper, a novel effective collaborative filtering algorithm based on user preference clustering is proposed to reduce the impact of the data sparsity. First, user groups are introduced to distinguish users with different preferences. Then, considering the preference of the active user, we obtain the nearest neighbor set from corresponding user group/user groups. Besides, a new similarity measure method is proposed to preferably calculate the similarity between users, which considers user preference in the local and global perspectives, respectively. Finally, experimental results on two benchmark data sets show that the proposed algorithm is effective to improve the performance of recommender systems.