Data sparsity and performance in collaborative filtering-based recommendation

Collaborative filtering is one of the most common methods that e-commerce sites and Internet information services use to personalize recommendations. Collaborative filtering has the advantage of being able to use even sparse evaluation data to predict preference scores for new products. To date, however, no in-depth investigation has been conducted on how the data sparsity effect in customers' evaluation data affects collaborative filtering-based recommendation performance. In this study, we analyzed the sparsity effect and used a hybrid method based on customers' evaluations and purchases collected from an online bookstore. Results indicated that recommendation performance decreased monotonically as sparsity increased, and that performance was more sensitive to sparsity in evaluation data rather than in purchase data. Results also indicated that the hybrid use of two different types of data (customers' evaluations and purchases) helped to improve the recommendation performance when evaluation data were highly sparse.