A new user similarity model to improve the accuracy of collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering has become one of the most used approaches to provide personalized services for users. The key of this approach is to find similar users or items using user-item rating matrix so that the system can show recommendations for users. However, most approaches related to this approach are based on similarity algorithms, such as cosine, Pearson correlation coefficient, and mean squared difference. These methods are not much effective, especially in the cold user conditions. This paper presents a new user similarity model to improve the recommendation performance when only few ratings are available to calculate the similarities for each user. The model not only considers the local context…