Exploring subspace clustering for recommendations

Abstract

Typically, recommendations are computed by considering users similar to the user in question. However, scanning the whole database of users for locating similar users is expensive. Existing approaches build user profiles by employing full-dimensional clustering to find sets of similar users. As the datasets we deal with are high-dimensional and incomplete, full-dimensional clustering is not the best option. To this end, we explore the fault tolerance subspace clustering approach that detects clusters of similar users in subspaces of the original feature space and also allows for missing values. Our experiments on real movie datasets show that the diversification of the similar users through subspace clustering results in better recommendations comparing to traditional collaborative filtering and full dimensional clustering approaches.