International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-018-0795-8

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Efficient collaborative filtering recommendations with multi‑channel

feature vectors
Heng‑Ru Zhang1,2 · Fan Min1   · Zhi‑Heng Zhang1,2 · Song Wang3

Received: 21 October 2016 / Accepted: 26 February 2018

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract
Feature vectors and similarity measures are the two key issues of most existing collaborative filtering (CF) algorithms. In
item-based CF algorithms, the feature vector is often defined as the ratings of all users for a given item. For a recommender
system with n users, m items, and c ratings, the length of the feature vector is n; hence, the time complexity of the similarity
computation is O(n). Consequently, the overall time complexity is O(m2 n2 ) , which may be computationally prohibitive for
recommender systems with millions of users. In this paper, we define the multi-channel feature vector (MCFV), which is a
vector of channel length c, and calculate the similarity between items using the respective MCFVs. Each element of an MCFV
corresponds to the number of users with respective ratings for the item. The time complexity for the similarity computation
is O(c), and the overall time complexity is O(m2 nc) when the k-nearest neighbors and weighted average algorithms are used.
Experiments were conducted on four movie recommender systems, where n ranges from a few hundred to half a million,
and c is five. Results show that the recommendation algorithms using our new similarity measure are significantly faster
than their counterparts without sacrificing prediction accuracy in terms of mean absolute error and root mean square error.

Keywords  Collaborative filtering · Feature-vector similarity · Multi-channel · Recommender system

1 Introduction ratings [1, 9] evaluated by the mean absolute error (MAE)

[10] and root mean square error (RMSE) [11]. Still others
Collaborative filtering (CF) is one of the earliest and most present a recommendation sequence (order) evaluated by
successful algorithms that underlie recommender systems the standard information retrieval measures half-life [12]
[1–4]. A latent assumption of the CF approach is that, in a and discounted-cumulative-gain [13]. In these different
social network, those who have agreed in the past tend to approaches, item-based recommenders are more reliable
agree again in the future [5]. Some recommender systems than user-based ones [14–17].
present nominal recommendations evaluated by accuracy The most commonly used algorithmic framework for CF
[6, 7] or cost [8]. Others present a numerical prediction of consists of two stages [1]: stage one identifies the neighbor-
hood of each item by computing the similarities between all
pairs of items, and stage two predicts the recommendations
This work is supported in part by the National Natural Science
Foundation of China (Grants 61379089, 41604114), the by integrating the ratings of the neighbors. To compute the
Innovation and Entrepreneurship Foundation of Southwest similarity, most existing approaches are based on vectors
Petroleum University (Grant SWPUSC16-003) and the Natural containing the rating information of all users for a given
Science Foundation of the Department of Education of Sichuan
item. These vectors are also known as feature vectors. Each
Province (Grant 16ZA0060).
vector has length n, where n is the total number of users
* Fan Min in the recommendation system. For popular metrics [1, 18]
minfanphd@163.com such as Pearson’s correlation [2], cosine similarity [19],
1 adjusted cosine, constrained correlation, mean squared dif-
School of Computer Science, Southwest Petroleum
University, Chengdu 610500, China ference, and Euclidean distance [20, 21], the time complex-
2 ity of the similarity computation for one item pair is O(n).
School of Science, Southwest Petroleum University,
Chengdu 610500, China Popular rating prediction techniques include top-k,
3 weighted average (WA), and hybrid methods. A similarity
Box Inc., 900 Jefferson Ave, Redwood City, CA 94063, USA

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 International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

index coupled with the top-k technique forms the k-nearest Table 1  Notations
neighbors (kNN) algorithm. A user’s rating of an item is Notation Meaning
predicted to be the average rating of his/her neighbors
[22]. In the WA approach, each item rated by the current U The set of all users
user is considered [23]. Hybrid techniques [24, 25] com- O The set of all items
bine the two techniques to compute the predicted rating C The set of channels
as a WA of the k nearest neighbors. Hence, the overall R The rating matrix
time and space complexities of the recommender system P The prediction matrix
are O(m2 n2 ) and O(mn), respectively. This complexity is n The number of users
computationally prohibitive for large datasets, making m The number of items
the recommendation algorithms infeasible in real world c The cardinality of C
situations. Therefore, a better approach to computing the ux The user ux
similarity measure is desired. oi The item oi
In this paper, we propose the multi-channel feature vector rx,i The rating of ux to oi
(MCFV). Using MCFVs, only O(c) time is needed to com- px,i The predicted rating of ux to oi
pute the similarity between two items, where c is the total rx,⋅ The average rating of ux
number of different ratings in the recommendation system. r⋅,i The average rating of oi
To form this vector, we divide the items into c channels.
The value of each channel is the number of users with rat-
ings for the respective item. The values of the channels form Table 2  Rating matrix (R) UID⟍OID o1 o2 o3
an MCFV of length c. In real applications such as movie
[26], music [27], news article [28], and book [29, 30] rec- u1 2 3 2
ommendation systems, c is a small constant. Generally, in u2 2 0 4
the Yahoo music and Amazon book store rating systems, c u3 4 0 0
is five [27, 29]. Consequently, the overall time and space
complexities of the recommender system are O(m2 nc) and
O(mc), respectively. These complexities are acceptable, even Hengr​u/MCFVC​ode). For clarity, we introduce the notation
for millions of users. used in this paper in Table 1.
To evaluate the performance of MCFVs in a recommen-
dation system, we conducted experiments on four bench-
mark datasets: two MovieLens datasets [31] (943 users (u) 2 Background
× 1682 movies (m) and 706 u × 8570 m; https​://group​lens.
org/datas​ets/movie​lens/), a DouBan dataset [32] (2965 u × CF recommender systems typically use a rating system as
39,695 m; https:​ //www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/irwin.​ king.new/pub/ their input and the recommendation accuracy as an evalua-
data/douban​ ), and a Netflix dataset [33] (480,189 u × 17,770 tion metric [34, 35].
m; http://netfl​ixpri​ze.com/). We adopted the leave-one-out
cross validation scenario for testing, and the prediction accu- 2.1 Rating system
racy of the results was evaluated by MAE and RMSE. The
results show that the algorithms using our similarity are sig- In a recommender system, it can be assumed that each user
nificantly faster than popular approaches, especially for large has voted on some items. We review the rating system pro-
datasets. For the DouBan dataset, they are 20 times faster posed in [8, 36]. Let U = {u1 , u2 , … , un } be the set of users
than the diffusion-based algorithm, and for the Netflix data- of a recommender system and O = {o1 , o2 , … , om } be the set
set, the runtimes of other approaches are simply impractical. of all possible items that can be recommended to them. The
Moreover, our algorithms are comparable to or better than rating function is defined as a relationship
popular approaches in terms of MAE and RMSE.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: we f ∶ U × O → C, (1)
present some preliminary knowledge about the rating system where C = {r1 , r2 , … , rc } is the channel set employed by the
and CF approaches in Sect. 2, we present the definition of users to evaluate the items. For convenience, we represent
MCFV as well its calculation with an example in Sect. 3, a rating system using an n × m rating matrix R = (rx,i )n×m ,
we present our experiments in Sect. 4, and our conclusions where rx,i = R(ux , oi ), 1 ≤ x ≤ n , and 1 ≤ i ≤ m.
are made in Sect. 5.
The implementation of the MCFV-based recommenda- Example 1  An example rating system for movies is depicted
tion system is available online (https​://githu​b.com/Zhang​ in Table  2, where C = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} . In Table  2, some

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International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

elements are zero, indicating that the users have not watched In item-based CF, the CD distance between two items
the corresponding movies. oi and oj is
∑n
r r
Given a rating system, we often test the performance of cd(oi , oj ) = �
x=1 x,i x,j
,
a CF approach using the leave-one-out scenario. For each ∑n 2 ∑n 2 (4)
r
x=1 x,i
r
x=1 x,j
rx,i ≠ 0 , we predict its value using all the other data in R.
The predicted value is denoted as px,i . In this way, we obtain
and the PD distance is
the prediction matrix P = (px,i )n×m . Here, px,i = 0 if rx,i = 0 , ∑n
indicating that the respective value is unknown/invalid. (rx,i − r⋅,i )(rx,j − r⋅,j )
x=1
Both MAE and RMSE are regularly employed to meas- pd(oi , oj ) = � , (5)
∑n 2
∑n 2
ure recommendation accuracy. The MAE of a predictor is x=1
(rx,i − r⋅,i ) x=1
(rx,j − r⋅,j )
defined as
where r⋅,i is the average rating of oi and Si,j is the set of users
∑n ∑m
x=1
�p − rx,i �
i=1 x,i
rating both items oi and oj . The ED distance is
mae(P, R) = . (2)
�{(x, i) ∈ {1..n} × {1..m}�rx,i > 0}� 1
ed(oi , oj ) = √∑ .
ux ∈Si,j (rx,i −rx,j )
2
(6)
The RMSE index [22] is defined as 1+ �Si,j �
� ∑n ∑m
(p − rx,i )2
i=1 x,i The time complexity of three approaches is O(n).
rmse(P, R) = x=1
. (3)
�{(x, i) ∈ {1..n} × {1..m}�rx,i > 0}� Shang et al. [5] divided every item into several chan-
nels, each of which represents a certain rating. With this
In Table 2, six ratings are tested using the leave-one-out representation, one can apply the diffusion process, which
scenario. is usually only used in the bipartite version of multi-chan-
The aim of many CF approaches is to minimize these nel systems [4]. From the viewpoint of granular computing
errors. They deal with the following problem. [44, 45], MCFV is a good tradeoff between rating vector
and rating count. A new similarity index, the diffusion-
Problem 1  MAE or RMSE minimization based similarity distance (DD), was given to quantify
the similarity between two items in a user–item bipartite
graph. The between two items oi and oj is
Input Rating matrix R.
1 ∑ ai,h aj,h
Output Prediction matrix P. dd(oi , oj ) = , (7)
k(j) k(h)
Scenario Leave-one-out cross validation. h∈C

Optimization objective min mae(P, R) or min rmse(P, R).
Naturally, the minimal possible value of mae(P, R) or
rmse(P, R) is zero. However, because there is a “magic”
barrier [37] in the dataset, we have no way of knowing the
true minimal MAE or RMSE of an application.
2.2 Item‑based CF approaches
CF recommender systems [2, 12] predict the preferences of
active users regarding items within the rating matrix. It has
been shown that item-based CF [38] gives more accurate
recommendations than user-based CF [39].
The kNN [34, 40] algorithm is one of the most fundamen-
tal CF recommendation methods. One key factor in the per-
formance of kNN algorithms is the definition of the distance
metric. Popular metrics include the cosine distance (CD)
[41], enhanced distance (ED) [42], and Pearson’s distance
(PD) [43].
where C is the set of channels, k(j) is the degree of item
oj , k(h) is the degree of channel h, ai,h = 1 if item oi is con-
nected to channel h, and ai,h = 0 otherwise. The time com-
plexity of the calculation of dd(oi , oj ) is O(n).
CF researchers have published few papers about how
to reduce the time complexity of similarity metrics [46].
Zhang et al. [46] designed linear time algorithms to com-
pute similarities. However, a space complexity of O(mn)
is required to store the similarities of items. Our proposed
approach requires a space complexity of only O(mc).
3 Proposed method
In this section, we present our method, which consists of
three steps: feature vector extraction, similarity computa-
tion, and rating prediction.

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 International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

3.1 Feature vector extraction Using this approach, the time complexity of a similarity
computation for an item pair is O(c).
To deal with the discrete ratings for items, we use a multi- We give the following example to illustrate the similarity
channel representation, where each item is mapped to several computation, as illustrated in Fig. 1. In this example, u1 and
channels, with the number of channels being equal to the num- u2 rate o1 as 2, u3 rates o1 as 4, and nobody rates o1 as 1, 3,
ber of different possible ratings [5]. Consider a user-channel or 5. Hence the MCFV of o1 is v(o1 ) = (0, 2, 0, 1, 0) . Simi-
bipartite graph [4] G = (U, C, E) , where U is the set of users, larly, we have v(o2 ) = (0, 0, 1, 0, 0) , and v(o3 ) = (0, 1, 0, 1, 0) .
C is the set of channels, and E is the set of edges connecting Finally, the cosine similarity of the item pairs are
the users and channels. Such a network consists of n users and cos(v(o1 ), v(o2 )) = 0, cos(v(o1 ), v(o3 )) = 0.94   , and
c × m channels (see Fig. 1). cos(v(o2 ), v(o3 )) = 0.
The connection to channel rl on item oi by user ux is
{ 3.3 Rating prediction
1, if rx,i = rl ;
a(ux , oi , rl ) =
0, otherwise. (8)
Given the similarity between items, we can predict the rat-
We extract the user-channel connections to obtain a feature ing of oi ∈ O by ux ∈ U  . To evaluate the performance of
vector of length c. Each element of the feature vector is the feature-vector extraction, we adopt two popular prediction
number of user’s connections to the corresponding channel. methods: top-k and WA.
The number of connections to channel rl on item oi is For the top-k method, we first find the k nearest neighbors
based on the cosine similarity. Denoting the set of neigh-
n
∑ bors of oi as N(oi ) , for ∀oj ∈ N(oi ) , we have rx,j ≠ 0 . The
d(oi , rl ) = a(ux , oi , rl ). (9) predicted rating is
x=1
∑
Therefore, the original vector of item oi with length n is oj ∈N(oi ) rx,j
px,i = . (12)
represented by the MCFV k
v(oi ) = [d(oi , r1 ), d(oi , r2 ), … , d(oi , rc )]. (10) In other words, the average rating of the neighbors is the
3.2 Similarity computation predicted value.
With the WA method, the predicted rating is given by
In this section, we demonstrate the computation of the cosine ∑
oj ∈{ok ∈O�rx,k ≠0} (sim(oi , oj ) × (rx,j − r.,j ))
similarity [20] between MCFVs. The similarity between oi px,i = r.,i + ∑ , (13)
and oj is defined as the cosine similarity between v(oi ) and oj ∈{ok ∈O�rx,k ≠0} sim(oi , oj )
v(oj ) , i.e.,
where ∀oi ∈ O,
v(oi )⋅v(oj )
sim(oi , oj ) = cos(v(oi ), v(oj )) = ��v(oi )����v(oj )�� ∑
∑c
(11) ux ∈U rx,i
l=1 d(oi ,rl )d(oj ,rl )
= √∑c √∑c . r.,i = (14)
i ,rl )
2
l=1 d(oChannels l=1 d(oj ,rl )
2 �{ux ∈ U�rx,i ≠ 0}�
1
is the average rating of oi.
2
Users
3 o1
4 3.4 Time and space complexities
u1
5

1
In real applications, many users visit a website simultane-
2
ously. The recommender system should predict their ratings
v(o1) = (0,2,0,1,0)
u2 3 o2 v(o2) = (0,0,1,0,0)
for the items for recommendation. Therefore, the recom-
4 v(o3) = (0,1,0,1,0) mender system should predict O(mn) ratings. Suppose we
5 are predicting px,i . The distance between oi and the other
1 items rated by ux should then be computed. Hence, we need
u3 2 O(m2 n) neighborhood computations. Using traditional simi-
3 o3 larity measures, this neighborhood computation takes O(n),
4 and the overall time complexity is
5

O(m2 n2 ). (15)
Fig. 1  MCFV for a multi-channel bipartite network

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International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

With the MCFV-based similarity, the neighborhood compu-
tation takes O(c), and the overall time complexity is
O(m2 nc). (16)
To compute the similarity of any item pair with traditional
measures, we can store all the rating information in a matrix.
The space complexity is
O(mn), (17)
which may be too large in practice. In contrast, using our
approach, the rating information of each item is stored in a
MCFV with space complexity O(c). The space complexity is
O(mc). (18)
However, providing a space complexity of O(mn) is not pos-
sible on our computer platform. Therefore, the rating infor-
mation of each item is stored in an independent file that is
read upon request. The number of file read operations is
O(m) for each prediction. However, we need to read these
files only once with the new measure.
4 Experiments
In this section, we compare the runtime, run-steps, MAE,
and RMSE of our algorithms and the existing well-known
approaches. The run-steps is the number of basic operations
(addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) executed
during the algorithm. It is computer-independent.
4.1 Datasets
To test the algorithmic accuracy, we used the four bench-
mark movie recommendation datasets listed in Table 3. The
ratings of all these datasets range from 1 to 5. Therefore, for
all these datasets, the number of channels is five.
4.2 Experiment design
For large datasets such as Netflix, it is impossible to store
all the existing information in memory. Therefore, we
store the rating information of each user for a given item
in a separate file. The file of existing ratings was com-
pressed. For the Netflix dataset, we required a total of
480, 189 + 17, 770 = 497, 959 files. To fairly compare the
runtime, all datasets were processed in this way.
We employed the leave-one-out cross-validation approach
for prediction: the original set iteratively leaves one rating
out for the test set while training on the rest. Its time com-
plexity is the same as on-line recommender systems, which
serve all users for all items.
We compared the performance of two predic-
tion approaches: top-k and WA. For the top-k and WA
approaches, we evaluated the performance of five similarity
indices: CD [41], DD [5], ED [42], PD [43], and MCFV.
These are well-known similarity metrics widely adopted by
the research community.
All experiments were performed on a personal computer
with an Intel Core i5-4460 3.20 GHz CPU and 4 GB mem-
ory. The operating system is Microsoft Windows 7. Note that
MCFV-based CF is called MCFV for brevity.
The MAE and RMSE are presented in Tables 5 and 6,
respectively. The runtime and run-steps are presented in
Tables 7 and 8, respectively. Because the runtime and run-
steps of the MAE measure are almost the same as those of
the RMSE measure, we only list the runtime and run-steps
of the MAE measure. Note that the flag “–” in these two
tables means that the results could not be obtained within a
practical time.

4.3 Comparison of MAE and RMSE

Table 3  Datasets
Dataset Users Items Ratings In typical commercial recommender systems, item-based
approaches provide more accurate recommendations, higher
MovieLens943u [31] 943 1682 100,000
computational efficiency, and require fewer updates than
MovieLens706u [31] 706 8570 100,023
user-based approaches [47]. As shown in Table 4, item-
DouBan [32] 2,965 39,695 912,479
based approaches have a lower MAE than user-based ones
Netflix [33] 480,189 17,770 100,480,507

Table 4  MAE comparison Approach Algorithm MovieLens943u MovieLens706u DouBan Netflix

of user- and item-based kNN
approaches Item-based kNN CD 0.7487 0.6898 0.6364 –
MCFV 0.7436 0.7001 0.5915 0.7155
User-based kNN CD 0.8002 0.8008 0.6474 –
MCFV 0.7827 0.7879 0.6164 0.7362

Bold values indicate the lowest error/minimum time

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 International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

Table 5  MAE of the five Approach Algorithm MovieLens943u MovieLens706u DouBan Netflix

similarity indices on the four
datasets kNN CD 0.7487 0.6898 0.6364 –
DD 0.7658 0.7576 0.6129 –
ED 0.7643 0.7565 0.6104
PD 0.8363 0.7706 0.7089 –
MCFV 0.7436 0.7001 0.5915 0.7155
WA CD 0.7332 0.7065 0.5853 –
DD 0.7412 0.7234 0.5954 –
ED 0.7400 0.7220 0.5926 –
PD 0.7548 0.7273 0.6026 –
MCFV 0.7413 0.7146 0.5888 0.7226

Bold values indicate the lowest error/minimum time

Table 6  RMSE of the five Approach Algorithm MovieLens943u MovieLens706u DouBan Netflix

similarity indices on the four
datasets kNN CD 0.9652 0.9050 0.8154 –
DD 0.9684 0.9850 0.7783 –
ED 0.9678 0.9845 0.7769 –
PD 1.044 0.9789 0.8859 –
MCFV 0.9471 0.9158 0.7552 0.9191
WA CD 0.9300 0.9215 0.7456 –
DD 0.9421 0.9415 0.7566 –
ED 0.9418 0.9412 0.7552 –
PD 0.9474 0.9388 0.7596 –
MCFV 0.9402 0.9319 0.7490 0.9214

Bold values indicate the lowest error/minimum time

Table 7  Runtime of the five Approach Algorithm MovieLens943u MovieLens706u DouBan Netflix

similarity indices on the four
datasets, unit: s kNN CD 98 72 5349 ≥ 5.3 × 105
DD 49 27 2198 ≥ 2.2 × 105
ED 67 52 4645 ≥ 4.6 × 105
PD 103 75 5596 ≥ 5.6 × 105
MCFV 2 7 98 9788
WA CD 98 72 5331 ≥ 4.6 × 105
DD 48 27 2057 ≥ 1.9 × 105
ED 66 52 4612 ≥ 4.0 × 105
PD 99 73 5372 ≥ 4.8 × 105
MCFV 2 6 79 8460

Bold values indicate the lowest error/minimum time

on the four datasets. Therefore, we only discuss item-based
approaches in Sects 4.3 and 4.4.
Table 5 shows the MAEs of the algorithms. For the kNN
approach, MCFV has a lower MAE than the other algo-
rithms on two datasets. For WA approach, we observe that
the CD distance has the best MAE and RMSE for all dat sets.
The MAE of MCFV is very close to the CD distance on all
datasets. Specifically, on the DouBan dataset, the MAE of
MCFV is 0.5888, compared with 0.5863 for CD distance.
Table 6 shows the RMSEs of the algorithms. For the kNN
approach, MCFV can obtain the best RMSE on two datasets,
MovieLens943u and DouBan. For the WA approach, the CD
distance obtains the best RMSE on all datasets. Note that the
RMSE of our method is very close to the best results. This

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International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics

Table 8  Run-steps of the five Approach Algorithm MovieLens943u MovieLens706u DouBan Netflix

similarity indices on the four
datasets, unit: 108 steps kNN CD 130 93 7015 ≥ 4.2 × 105
DD 63 37 3336 ≥ 2.0 × 105
ED 89 67 6091 ≥ 3.6 × 105
PD 136 97 7339 ≥ 4.4 × 105
MCFV 5 17 243 14,691
WA CD 129 93 6961 ≥ 3.7 × 105
DD 62 36 3314 ≥ 1.8 × 105
ED 88 66 6036 ≥ 3.2 × 105
PD 130 94 7022 ≥ 3.9 × 105
MCFV 4 15 183 12,925

demonstrates that the RMSE of our proposed approach is
comparable to existing approaches.
According to Tables 5 and 6, MCFV-based CF performs
well in terms of MAE and RMSE. The MCFV-based kNN
approach obtains the best MAE and RMSE on the Mov-
ieLens (943 u × 1682 m) and DouBan (2965 u × 39,695
m) datasets. The MAE on MovieLens (706 u × 8570 m) is
0.7001, which is very close to the best MAE 0.6898 for all
algorithms. In addition, the RMSE on MovieLens (706 u ×
8570 m) is 0.9158, which is very close to the best value of
0.9050.
4.4 Comparison of runtime and run‑steps
The runtime is compared in Table 7, and the run-steps is
compared in Table 8. Note that the runtime is the total exe-
cution time, which includes the file input and output over-
head. In addition, the run-steps value also contains the file
input and output overhead. For the values of the “–” within
these tables, we estimated them based on the values obtained
for the DouBan dataset. For example, in Table 7, the runtime
of the cosine similarity measure on Netflix is estimated to be
5349
98
× 9788 ≈ 5.3 × 105 s.
Because the CD distance and MCFV take O(n) and O(c),
respectively, to compute the similarity, we expect the runt-
ime of CD to be n / c times that of ours. In the first three
datasets, n / c should be 189, 141, and 393, respectively.
The experimental values are 49, 10, and 55, respectively,
as indicated by Table 7. They generally comply with the
expected values.
MCFV-based CF is also significantly faster than the other
algorithms, as shown in Table 7. The DD distance is the
second fastest; however, it is at least four times slower than
MCFV. The advantage of our algorithms is more significant
on larger datasets. For Netflix, which has 480,189 users,
the existing methods cannot finish the experiment within
48 h. In contrast, our algorithm requires about 2 h in our
environment.
MCFV-based CF has fewer steps than the other algo-
rithms, as shown in Table 8. In the best situations, our algo-
rithms need about half the steps of DD. Again, for Netflix,
the existing methods require about at least 1.8 × 1013 steps,
our algorithm requires about 1.3 × 1012 steps.
5 Conclusion
In this paper, we defined the MCFV, which is a vector of
length c, and proposed two fast CF algorithms based on it.
Using an MCFV, it takes only O(c) time to compute the
similarity between two items, compared with the O(n) of
classic cosine similarity. MCFV-based CFs are significantly
faster than popular algorithms, especially for large datasets.
With the leave-one-out scenario, the runtime of popular
approaches is simply impractical for the Netflix dataset. In
contrast, our algorithms take less than 2 h to finish this task
on a PC. Moreover, our algorithms’ performances are gener-
ally better than the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of
MAE and RMSE. Therefore, they are more scalable than
existing neighborhood-based CF approaches. In future work,
we will study the application of MCFV to matrix factoriza-
tion in big data scenarios.
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