Recommender systems: a novel approach based on singular value decomposition

Abstract

Due to modern information and communication technologies (ICT), it is increasingly easier to exchange data and have new services available through the internet. However, the amount of data and services available increases the difficulty of finding what one needs. In this context, recommender systems represent the most promising solutions to overcome the problem of the so-called information overload, analyzing users' needs and preferences. Recommender systems (RS) are applied in different sectors with the same goal: to help people make choices based on an analysis of their behavior or users' similar characteristics or interests. This work presents a different approach for predicting ratings within the model-based collaborative filtering, which exploits singular value factorization. In particular, rating forecasts were generated through the characteristics related to users and items without the support of available ratings. The proposed method is evaluated through the MovieLens100K dataset performing an accuracy of 0.766 and 0.951 in terms of mean absolute error and root-mean-square error.