Similarity measures for Collaborative Filtering-based Recommender Systems: Review and experimental comparison

Collaborative Filtering (CF) filters the flow of data that can be recommended, by a Recommender System (RS), to a target user according to his taste and his preferences. The target user's profile is built based on his similarity with other users. For this reason, CF technique is very sensitive to the similarity measure used to quantify the dependency strength between two users (or two items). In this paper we provide an in-depth review on similarity measures used for CF-based RS. For each measure, we outline its fundamental background and we test its performance through an experimental study. Experiments are carried out on three standard datasets (MovieLens100k, MovieLens1M and Jester) and reveal many important conclusions. In fact, results show that ITR and IPWR are the most suitable similarity measures for a user-based RS while AMI is the best choice for an item-based RS. Evaluation metrics show that under the user-based approach, ITR obtains an MAE equal to 0.786 and 0.731 on MovieLens100k and MovieLens1M, respectively. Whereas, IPWR reach an MAE equal to 3.256 on Jester. Also, AMI gets under the item-based approach an MAE equal to 0.745, 0.724 and 3.281 on MovieLens100k, MovieLens1M and Jester, respectively.