DOI: https://doi.org/10.15368/theses.2010.4
Available at: https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/theses/238
Date of Award
1-2010
Degree Name
MS in Computer Science
Department/Program
Computer Science
Advisor
Alexander Dekhtyar
Abstract
Nowadays the largest E-commerce or E-service websites offer millions of products for sale. A Recommender system is defined as software used by such websites for recommending commercial or noncommercial product items to users according to the users’ tastes. In this project, we develop a recommender system for a private multimedia web service company. In particular, we devise three recommendation engines using different data filtering methods – named weighted-average, K-nearest neighbors, and item-based – which are based on collaborative filtering techniques, which work by recording user preferences on items and by anticipating the future likes and dislikes of users by comparing the records, for prediction of user preference. To acquire proper input data for the three engines, we retrieve data from database using three data collection techniques: active filtering, passive filtering, and item-based filtering. For experimental purpose we compare prediction accuracy of those three recommendation engines with the results from each engine and additionally we evaluate the performance of weighted-average method using an empirical analysis approach – a methodology which was devised for verification of predictive accuracy.