Using SVD and demographic data for the enhancement of generalized Collaborative Filtering

In this paper we examine how Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) along with demographic information can enhance plain Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms. After a brief introduction to SVD, where some of its previous applications in Recommender Systems are revisited, we proceed with a full description of our proposed method which utilizes SVD and demographic data at various points of the filtering procedure in order to improve the quality of the generated predictions. We test the efficiency of the resulting approach on two commonly used CF approaches (User-based and Item-based CF). The experimental part of this work involves a number of variations of the proposed approach. The results show that the combined utilization of SVD with demographic data is promising, since it does not only tackle some of the recorded problems of Recommender Systems, but also assists in increasing the accuracy of systems employing it. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.