2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)
Rating Prediction on Movie Recommendation
System: Collaborative Filtering Algorithm (CFA) vs.
Dissymetrical Percentage Collaborative Filtering
Algorithm (DSPCFA)
Johan Eko Purnomo
Department of Computer Science
Universitas Diponegoro
Semarang, Indonesia
johanepu@gmail.com
Abstract— Recommendation system is one of many solutions
for getting information rapidly from the many data available and
one of its applications is the movie recommendation system. Movie
recommendation system filters information then recommends
movies based on rating preferences or user information. One of
the most widely used algorithms is the user based collaborative
filtering algorithm (CFA) to predict movie ratings which will be
recommended based on similarity between target user and other
users regardless of common items or the number of movies that
have been rated by both. One different approach of the CFA
algorithm is a dissymmetrical percentage collaborative filtering
algorithm (DSPCFA) that involves common items as a
consideration of measuring similarity. This study also uses two
similarity measurement methods, namely the pearson correlation
similarity method and the cosine similarity method as a
comparison to determine the characteristics of each measurement
method. The experiment results show that the DSPCFA algorithm
produces a lower error value than the CFA algorithm with an
error decrease of about 5% for the RMSE evaluation method
(Root-mean Squared Error) and an error decrease of about 7%
using the MAE (Mean Absolute Error) evaluation method. While
measurement method tested shows that the pearson correlation
similarity method produces a lower error value than the cosine
similarity method.
Keywords— movie reccomendation system, collaborative
filtering algorithm, dissymmetrical percentage collaborative filtering
algorithm, common items
I. INTRODUCTION
A large amount of the existing information requires the
process of sorting the information needed to be done quickly and
precisely. It also applies to the entertainment media, especially
movies which have high quantity and complexity of data which
if not handled effectively and efficiently will create problems
such as many time wasted.
The movie recommendation system presents a movie
prediction adjusted to users. It is important because it can
reduce the time needed by the user to search for movie
recommendation that matches the user’s preferences. The
recommendation system generally divided into three filtering
techniques, namely content-based filtering, collaborative
978-1-7281-4610-2/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
Sukmawati Nur Endah
Department of Computer Science
Universitas Diponegoro
Semarang, Indonesia
sukma_ne@if.undip.ac.id
filtering, and hybrid filtering [1]. The use of filtering technique
in some studies is often combined with supporting algorithm
such as KNN, computational intelligence, Singular Value
Decomposition, and so on. It aims to reduce or eliminate the
weaknesses of the filtering technique used.
Reference [2] use the item-based filtering algorithm method
by focusing on the use of genre-based movie similarity
functions to eliminate the cold-start problem in the
recommendation system, but it is very dependent on the
accuracy of the movie genre determination. Reference [3]
developed a hybrid model approach based on collaborative
filtering to produce a movie recommendation that combines
dimensional reduction techniques with clustering algorithms so
that feature selection can be run as a whole in the form of
smaller dimensions then using the K-means process to cluster
users that are considered similar to this approach for at least
overcome problems related to data dimensions that are too
large. Reference [4] built a recommendation system using
simple item-based collaborative filtering techniques with a
comparative approach between the number of users and the
number of movie items where the use of item-based will run
well if the number of users is much bigger than the number of
movie items.
Based on past research and increasing the need for system
recommendations, we need new technology to dramatically
improve system recommendations performance [4]. This study
focuses on the user-based collaborative filtering algorithm
(CFA) that predicts movie rating to be recommended to users
by utilizing movie ratings from other users who have similar
behaviors.
The implementation of the CFA often produces similarity
results between users without pay attention to the influence of
the number of items/movies that are rated between these users,
resulting in users who are less suitable or relevant to the target
user [5]. One solution to this matter is to involve many common
items as a consideration and become part of the method of
measuring similarity. There are three types of variations of the
 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)
CFA that use the threshold for common items based on their
consideration-based, namely: percentage-based threshold, log
value based threshold, and probability value-based threshold
[5].
This study compares between a conventional CFA and
variations of CFA-based techniques using percentage-based
thresholds with an asymmetrical approach or called
dissymmetrical percentage collaborative filtering algorithm
(DSPCFA). The DSPCFA uses a percentage of the rating
number of the target user as a threshold for the minimum number
of common items that must be owned among the target user and
other users [5]. This study also uses two similarity measurement
methods, namely the Pearson correlation similarity method and
the cosine similarity method. Tests were performed comparing
the error values from the results of the predicted rating produced
by the CFA compared to the DSPCFA while comparing the
characteristics of the two methods of measuring similarity. The
test seeks to determine the effect of using common items as a
threshold measure of similarity to the results of rating
predictions so that these results can provide insight that can be
used for the development of the recommendation system going
forward to improve the quality of the output of the
recommendation system.
II. METODOLOGY
There are several processes to generate prediction ratings
from the recommendation system. This study produces a
prediction rating based on an experiment scenario using a
combination of filtering algorithms and similarity measurement
methods. While the process block for generating prediction
rating and evaluation is shown in Fig. 1.
A. Data Collection
Data is downloaded directly from the Movielens website
which is managed directly by Group Lens Research, the data
provided is a collection of various kinds of movies from various
years with ratings that are already available by several users. The
initial data has 100,004 ratings and 3683 tags which were
applied to 9,125 movies. The movies were rated by 610 users
gradually from March 29, 1996 to September 24, 2018. Dataset
consists of 4 CSV files: ratings.csv, tags.csv, movies.csv, and
links.csv [6].
B. Pre-processing Data
In this pre-processing stage, data is simplified before
entering computational processes. This stage includes the
process of selecting columns/attributes used in the dataset and
the process of combining files in the dataset to create data with
new structures that are needed by the computational processes.
One process that occurs at this stage is the process of
transforming combined data between movies data and rating
data by mapping records contained in movies data and rating
data into columns and rows in the form of dataframes. This
rating dataframe is used to map user ratings with users and
movies as cross index [7], the mapping of rating dataframe can
be seen in Fig. 2.
Fig. 1. Process block for generating and evaluating prediction rating
Users are represented by userId while movies are
represented by movieId for movies. The blank element in the
dataframe referred to as 'NaN' (Not A Number) element, occurs
when the user does not have a rating on the associated movie
according to the mapping, this blank value will be ignored and
not calculated on the similarity measurement.
C. Similarity Measurement
The similarity between users is calculated by evaluating the
rating of the movies rated by both users. Each user has N-
dimensional vectors to represent movie ratings. Measurements
are made using the rating dataframe as a representation of input
data. In this process, there are differences in the use of the
similarity measurement method between the CFA and the
DSPCFA.
Common items in DSPCFA will be calculated first and used
as a requirement of the output similarity measurement method.
The requirement is the number of common items needs to
exceed the threshold, where the threshold is determined by the
variable 𝑝. The variable 𝑝 is multiplied by the number of ratings
owned by the target user and the result will be used as a
threshold value. Meanwhile, the number of common items in
CFA does not have to exceed a certain threshold but the number
of common items cannot be empty or zero. The equation to
describe the DSPCFA can be written as follows [5]:
0, 𝐶𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) < 𝑝 ∗ 𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥)
𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) = { (1)
𝑓(𝑥, 𝑦), 𝐶𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) ≥ 𝑝 ∗ 𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥)
Where 𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) on (1) denotes the similarity between user
x and user y. Variable 𝑝 represents number of percentage.
𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥) is number of rating given by user x while 𝐶𝑁𝑢𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦)
is number of common items between user x and user y. Where
𝑓(𝑥, 𝑦) represents a similarity measurement method that used.
This study is using two similarity measurement method namely
pearson correlation similarity and cosine similarity.
1) Pearson Correlation Similarity
This method used to measure the extent to which two
variables linearly relate with each other and is defined as [7]:
∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦(𝑟𝑥,𝑠 −𝑟
̅̅̅)(𝑟 ̅̅̅)
𝑦,𝑠 −𝑟
𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) =
𝑥 𝑦
(2)
√∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦(𝑟𝑥,𝑠 −𝑟
2
𝑥 √∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦 (𝑟𝑦,𝑠 −𝑟
̅̅̅) ̅̅̅)
𝑦
2
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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)
Fig. 2. Mapping of rating dataframe (cross index of movies and user ratings)
From (2), 𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) denotes the similarity between user x
and user y, 𝑟𝑥,𝑠 is the rating given to movie s by user x, 𝑟̅𝑥 is the
mean rating given by user x. Where 𝑟𝑦,𝑠 is the rating given to
movie s by user y, 𝑟̅𝑦 is the mean rating given by user y while
𝑠𝑥𝑦 is the set of movies in the user-movies cross index space.
The difference between Pearson correlation similarity and
cosine similarity is that there is vector normalization happened
in this equation part 𝑟𝑥,𝑠 − 𝑟̅𝑥 and 𝑟𝑦,𝑠 − 𝑟̅𝑦 when the rating by
user is reduced by the mean rating given by user itself. That
vector normalization process makes the vector invariant toward
scaling.
2) Cosine Similarity
Cosine similarity is different from Pearson-based measure
in that it is a vector-space model which is based on linear
algebra rather that statistical approach [1]. It measures the
similarity between two n-dimensional vectors based on the
angle between them [7]. The similarity between two users x and
y can be defined as follows [7]:
∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦 𝑟𝑥,𝑠 𝑟𝑦,𝑠
𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) =
2
√∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦(𝑟𝑥,𝑠 ) √∑𝑠∈𝑠𝑥𝑦(𝑟𝑦,𝑠 )
2
The description of the notation is the same as the pearson
correlation similarity from before.
D. Movie Recommendation using CFA/DSPCFA
This stage contains a prediction process and determining the
recommended movies. The prediction process is based on
nearest K-nearest users with highest similarity value [5].
1) Selection for the K-nearest user
This process sorts the user from the closest one with highest
similarity value with the target user. Then use the K variable
to determine a maximum number of the nearest user.
2) Calculate prediction rating
K-nearest users who have been selected in the previous
process is used to calculate prediction ratings for movies that
have not been rated by the target user. The formula for
calculating predictions ratings is as follows [7]:
𝑟𝑥,𝑖 = 𝑟̅𝑥 + 𝑘 ∑𝑦∈𝑈 𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) ∗ (𝑟𝑦,𝑖 − 𝑟̅𝑦 ) (4)
While
𝑘 = 1⁄∑ |𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦)| (5)
𝑦∈𝑈
From (4)(5), 𝑟𝑥,𝑖 denotes the predicted score of user x to
movie i, while 𝑟̅𝑥 is the mean rating given by user x. 𝑟𝑦,𝑖 is the
rating given to movie i by user y while 𝑟̅𝑦 is the mean rating
(3) given by user y. Where k is the weight value of K-user as nearest
users of user x while 𝑠𝑖𝑚(𝑥, 𝑦) is similarity value between user
x and user y.
3) Make recommendations based on prediction rating
This process determines which films will be recommended
based on movies with the highest predicted rating without
including films that have been watched or rated by the target
user so that the recommended movies will only include films
that have not been watched by the target user. While the number
of recommended movies uses independent variable N so that
the final output of the system is N-movies recommendations.
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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

E. Evaluation and Interpretation TABLE I. MAPPING OF TEST SCENARIOS

At this stage, an evaluation and an interpretation of the
results of the prediction calculation is carried out. The
evaluation process for calculating error values in this study was
using the Root Mean Squared Error or RMSE [8] and Mean
Absolute Method or MAE [1] methods. The formula for
calculating the RMSE and MAE error values is as follows
[1][8]:
1 2
𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 = √ ∑𝑥,𝑖(𝑝𝑥,𝑖 − 𝑟𝑥,𝑖 ) (6)
𝑁
From (6) 𝑝𝑥,𝑖 denotes the predicted score of user x to movie
i, while 𝑟𝑥,𝑖 is the actual rating given by user x to movie i and N
is the number of rating given by user x on movies set.
1
𝑀𝐴𝐸 = ∑𝑥,𝑖 |𝑝𝑥,𝑖 − 𝑟𝑥,𝑖 | (7)
𝑁
The description of (7) is the same as the RMSE equation
from before. To provide a representative description of the error
value of the RMSE and MAE evaluation methods for the whole
system, this study uses an average RMSE or MAE error value
from the sample users test, so that the average system
representative error value equation can be written as follows [5]:
∑𝑁
𝑖=1 𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸𝑖
𝐴𝑣𝑔 𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 = (8)
𝑁
Scenario 1 2
A CFA with pearson DSPCFA with pearson
correlation similarity correlation similarity
B CFA with cosine similarity DSPCFA with cosine similarity
C. Test Results
1) Scenario 1
In this scenario, rating prediction is carried out using the
CFA algorithm and uses two similarity measurement methods
to be compared in a 2-dimensional graph that illustrates the
distribution of error values from the prediction rating based on
the distribution of K values or the number of nearest users. The
error value is obtained from the evaluation using RMSE and
MAE by comparing the predicted rating of a movie that has
been rated using CFA algorithm with the actual rating. The
graph that shows the error value of Scenario 1 can be seen in
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4.
Fig. 3 and Fig. 4 show the spread of Pearson correlation
similarity values are lower than cosine similarity both in the
evaluation of RMSE and MAE. Both evaluations show a
correlation between the decrease in error value and the K value
to a certain amount.

From the above equation, 𝑅𝑀𝑆𝐸 denotes the error value

from root mean squared error evaluation method, while i is the
iteration index of sample user and N is the number of the sample
users.
∑𝑁
𝑖=1 𝑀𝐴𝐸𝑖
𝐴𝑣𝑔 𝑀𝐴𝐸 = (9)
𝑁

The description of the notation above is the same as the

Avg RMSE equation from before.

III. EXPERIMENT RESULTS

A. Testing Data
Fig. 3. The comparison of RMSE error value for Scenario 1 (CFA) on the
This test uses 36 random user samples from 671 available distribution of K
users. By taking a sample of random users from each of the 20
users per-sample group out of a total of 671 users it is expected
to provide an overview of the actual collective testing. This test
focuses on rating value by comparing the rating prediction
result on the films that already have a rating with the original
rating to examine and compare the result of the combination of
the used method by using small amount of subjectivity value.
B. Testing Scenarios
Test scenarios are divided based on a combination of
filtering algorithms and similarity measurement methods as
shown on Table I. Predicted rating results from Scenario 1 (A /
B) and Scenario 2 (A / B) are evaluated to see the error value of
predicted ratings.

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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

Fig. 6. The comparison of RMSE error value for Scenario 2B (DSPCFA-

Cosine)

Fig. 4. The comparison of MAE error value for Scenario 1 (CFA) on the
distribution of K

2) Scenario 2
In this scenario, rating prediction is done by using the
DSPCFA and using two similarity measurement methods to be
compared in a 3-dimensional graph that illustrates the
distribution of the error value of the prediction rating based on
the distribution of the p value or the percentage value and the K
value or the number of nearest users. The error value is obtained
from the evaluation of RMSE and MAE by comparing the
predicted rating of a movie that has been rated using DSPCFA
algorithm with the actual rating. The graph that shows the error Fig. 7. The comparison of MAE error value for Scenario 2A (DSPCFA-
Pearson)
value of Scenario 2 can be seen in Fig. 5 until Fig. 8.
The results showed by Fig. 5 to Fig 8 implying that there is
not much difference in the form of error distribution between
one to another with the average spread of the lowest error value
at the point p = 0.3 with the highest distribution of error values
found at the point p = 0.8. Based on these results, the DSPCFA
algorithm shows the best results with an ideal p-value. The
results in Fig. 5 to Fig. 8 shows the average ideal p-value at p =
0.3 which indicates the congruence of common items limitation
that suitable to the distribution of user-ratings or datasets.

Fig. 8. The comparison of MAE error value for Scenario 2B (DSPCFA-

Cosine)

Fig. 5 The comparison of RMSE error value for Scenario 2A (DSPCFA-
Pearson)
D. Result Analysis
The final test compares the error value from the evaluation
result on Scenario 1A/B and 2A/B based on Root-Mean
Squared Error (RMSE) and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) error
value between one scenario to another. Table II shows the result
of the minimum error value using RMSE and MAE for each
scenario and seeks the best scenario or the best filtering
algorithm combination and similarity measurement method that
produces the smallest error value. Table III shows the result of
minimum error value using RMSE and MAE for each scenario
and seeks the decrease of error value on DSPCFA towards CFA
error value.

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 2019 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Computational Sciences (ICICoS)

TABLE II. THE RESULT OF MINIMUM ERROR VALUE FOR EACH REFERENCES
SCENARIO
[1] F. Isinkaye, Y.O.Folajimi, and B.A. Ojokoh, "Recommendation
Evaluation Filtering Similarity Error Value systems: Principles, methods and evaluation," Egyptian Informatics
Method Algorithm Method Journal, 2015.
RMSE Scenario 1 Pearson (A) 0.86119
(CFA) Cosine (B) 0.88768 
[2] Parivash Pirasteh, Jason J. Jung and Dosam Hwang, "Item-Based
Scenario 2 Pearson (A) 0.80483 Collaborative Filtering with Attribute Correlation: A Case Study on
(DSPCFA) Cosine (B) 0.83988 Movie Recommendation," ACIIDS 2014, p. 245–252, 2014.
Min. Error DSPCFA Pearson (A) 0.80483 [3] Zan Wang, Xue Yu, Nan Feng and Zhenhua Wang, "An improved
MAE Scenario 1 Pearson (A) 0.67463 collaborative movie recommendation system using computational
(CFA) Cosine (B) 0.69791 intelligence," Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, no. 25, pp.
Scenario 2 Pearson (A) 0.62192 667-675, 2014.
(DSPCFA) Cosine (B) 0.64953 [4] L. T. Ponnam, S.D. Punyasamudram, S.N. Nallagulla, S. Yellamati
Min. Error DSPCFA Pearson (A) 0.62192 "Movie Recommender System Using Item Based Collaborative
Filtering Technique," 2016.
[5] Q. Wang, T. Zhang and Z. Rong, "Collaborative Filtering Similarity
Algorithm Using Common Items," WHICEB 2017, vol. 16, 2017.
TABLE III. THE RESULT OF DSPCFA MINIMUM ERROR VALUE TO CFA [6] GroupLens, "MovieLens | GroupLens," 2015. [Online]. Available:
http://grouplens.org/datasets/movielens/. [Accessed 13 08 2018].
Evaluation Similarity Scenario Scenario 2 The decrease
[7] Bei-Bei C. , "Design and Implementation of Movie Recommendation
Method Method 1 (CFA) (DSPCFA) of DSPCFA
System Based on," ITM Web of Conferences, vol. 12, 2017.
error to CFA
RMSE Pearson 0.86119 0.80483 6.54% [8] C. J. Willmott and K. Matsuura, "Advantages of the mean absolute error
Cosine 0.88768 0.83988 5.38% (MAE) over the root mean square error (RMSE) in assessing average
MAE Pearson 0.67463 0.62192 7.81% model performance," CLIMATE RESEARCH, vol. 30, pp. 79-82, 2005.
Cosine 0.69791 0.64953 6.93%

Based on the chart and the tables above, pearson correlation

similarity measurement method produces smaller error value
compared to cosine similarity method. It means the
implementation of vector normalization on the vector resulting
smaller error value than without using the normalization. While
on DSPCFA, the overall use of the threshold was able to
significantly reduce the error value when using either pearson
correlation similarity or cosine similarity measurement method.
One thing to note is that DSPCFA will work effectively on the
distribution of users who have a variety of common items, while
the fewer users who have a relationship with the target user will
reduce the effectiveness of DSPCFA because it will make
limitation and consideration of the minimum value of common
items will be increasingly insignificant. DSPCFA also needs to
pay attention to the limitation values of common items, because
if the common item limitation value is too high or too low it will
reduce the effectiveness and reduce the accuracy of the rating
prediction.
IV. CONCLUSION
The use of threshold to give limitation on the minimum
number of common items that used in DSPCFA produces
smaller evaluation error value than CFA with a decrease around
5% for RMSE evaluation method and 7% decrease for MAE
evaluation method. In contrast based on the prediction rating
result, Pearson correlation similarity measurement method
produces smaller error value than cosine similarity method.
These results indicate the use of limitations on common items
used in DSPCFA results in better predictions of CFA.