Demographic information combined with collaborative filtering for an efficient recommendation system

Abstract

The recommendation system is a filtering system. It filters a collection of things based on the historical behavior of a user, it also tries to make predictions based on user preferences and make recommendations that interest customers. While incredibly useful, they can face various challenges affecting their performance and utility. Some common problems are, for example, when the number of users and items grows, the computational complexity of generating recommendations increases, which can increase the accuracy and precision of recommendations. So, for this purpose and to improve recommendation system results, we propose a recommendation system combining the demographic approach with collaborative filtering, our approach is based on users’ demographic information such as gender, age, zip code, occupation, and historical ratings of the users. We cluster the users based on their demographic data using the k-means algorithm and then apply collaborative filtering to the specific user cluster for recommendations. The proposed approach improves the results of the collaborative filtering recommendation system in terms of precision and recommends diverse items to users.