Hybrid User-Item Based Collaborative Filtering

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely used in recommendation systems. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms face two major challenges: data sparsity and scalability. In this study, we propose a hybrid method based on item based CF trying to achieve a more personalized product recommendation for a user while addressing some of these challenges. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) combined with average filling is used to handle the sparsity of data set, while Self-Organizing Map (SOM) optimized with Genetic Algorithm (GA) performs user clustering in large datasets to reduce the scope for item-based CF. The proposed method shows encouraging results when evaluated and compared with the traditional item based CF algorithm.