$l$-Injection: Toward Effective Collaborative Filtering Using

摘要

We develop a novel framework, named as$l$-injection, to address the sparsity problem of recommender systems. By carefully injecting low values to a selected set of unrated user-item pairs in a user-item matrix, we demonstrate that top-Nrecommendation accuracies of various collaborative filtering (CF) techniques can be significantly and consistently improved. We first adopt the notion ofpre-use preferencesof users toward a vast amount ofunrateditems. Using this notion, we identifyuninterestingitems that have not been rated yet but are likely to receive low ratings from users, and selectively impute them as low values. As our proposed approach is method-agnostic, it can be easily applied to a variety of CF algorithms. Through comprehensive experiments with three real-life datasets (e.g., Movielens, Ciao, and Watcha), we demonstrate that our solution consistently and universally enhances the accuracies of existing CF algorithms (e.g., item-based CF, SVD-based CF, and SVD++) by 2.5 to 5 times on average. Furthermore, our solution improves the running time of those CF methods by 1.2 to 2.3 times when its setting produces the best accuracy. The datasets and codes that we used in the experiments are available at:https://goo.gl/KUrmip.