A novel neighbor selection scheme based on dynamic evaluation towards recommender systems

Abstract

Collaborative filtering is a kind of widely used and efficient technique in various online environments, which generates recommendations based on the rating information of his/her similar-preference neighbors. However, existing collaborative filtering methods have some inadequacies in revealing the dynamic user preference change and evaluating the recommendation effectiveness. The sparsity of input data may further exacerbate this issue. Thus, this paper proposes a novel neighbor selection scheme constructed in the context of information attenuation to bridge these gaps. Firstly, the concept of the preference decay period is given to describe the pattern of user preference evolution and recommendation invalidation, and thus two types of dynamic decay factors are correspondingly defined to gradually weaken the impact of old data. Then, three dynamic evaluation modules are built to evaluate the user's trustworthiness and recommendation ability. Finally, A hybrid selection strategy combines these modules to construct two neighbor selection layers and adjust the neighbor key thresholds. Through this strategy, our scheme can more effectively select capable and trustworthy neighbors to provide recommendations. The experiments on three real datasets with different data sizes and data sparsity show that the proposed scheme provides excellent recommendation performance and is more suitable for real applications, compared to the state-of-the-art methods.