A Similarity Measure for Collaborative Filtering with Implicit Feedback

Collaborative Filtering(CF) is a widely accepted method of creating recommender systems. CF is based on the similarities among users or items. Measures of similarity including the Pearson Correlation Coefficient and the Cosine Similarity work quite well for explicit ratings, but do not capture real similarity from the ratings derived from implicit feedback. This paper identifies some problems that existing similarity measures have with implicit ratings by analyzing the characteristics of implicit feedback, and proposes a new similarity measure called Inner Product that is more appropriate for implicit ratings. We conducted experiments on user-based collaborative filtering using the proposed similarity measure for two e-commerce environments. Empirical results show that our similarity measure better captures similarities for implicit ratings and leads to more accurate recommendations. Our inner product-based similarity measure could be useful for CF-based recommender systems using implicit ratings in which negative ratings are difficult to be incorporated.