Efficient Collaborative Filtering in Content-Addressable Spaces

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is currently one of the most popular and most widely used personalization techniques. It generates personalized predictions based on the assumption that users with similar tastes prefer similar items. One of the major drawbacks of the CF from the computational point of view is its limited scalability since the computational effort required by the CF grows linearly both with the number of available users and items. This work proposes a novel efficient variant of the CF employed over a multidimensional content-addressable space. The proposed approach heuristically decreases the computational effort required by the CF algorithm by limiting the search process only to potentially similar users. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed heuristic approach is capable of generating predictions with high levels of accuracy, while significantly improving the performance in comparison with the traditional implementations of the CF.