A New Similarity Measure for User-based Collaborative Filtering in Recommender Systems

Collaborative filtering is a popular approach in recommender Systems that helps users in identifying the items they may like in a wagon of items. Finding similarity among users with the available item ratings so as to predict rating(s) for unseen item(s) based on the preferences of likeminded users for the current user is a challenging problem. Traditional measures like Cosine similarity and Pearson correlation’s correlation exhibit some drawbacks in similarity calculation. This paper presents a new similarity measure which improves the performance of Recommender System. Experimental results on MovieLens dataset show that our proposed distance measure improves the quality of prediction. We present clustering results as an extension to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.