An Evolutionary Scheme for Improving Recommender System Using Clustering

In user memory based collaborative filtering algorithm, recommendation quality depends strongly on the neighbors selection which is a high computation complexity task in large scale datasets. A common approach to overpass this limitation consists of clustering users into groups of similar profiles and restrict neighbors computation to the cluster that includes the target user. K-means is a popular clustering algorithms used widely for recommendation but initial seeds selection is still a hard complex step. In this paper a new genetic algorithm encoding is proposed as an alternative of k-means clustering. The initialization issue in the classical k-means is targeted by proposing a new formulation of the problem, to reduce the search space complexity affect as well as improving clustering quality. We have evaluated our results using different quality measures. The employed metrics include rating prediction evaluation computed using mean absolute error. Additionally, we employed both of precision and recall measures using different parameters. The obtained results have been compared against baseline techniques which proved a significant enhancement.