BinRec: addressing data sparsity and cold-start challenges in recommender systems with biclustering

Recommender Systems help users in making decision in different fields such as purchases or what movies to watch. User Based Collaborative Filtering (UBCF) approach is one of the most commonly used techniques for developing these soft ware tools. It is based on the idea that users who have previously...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rodríguez-Baena, Domingo, Gómez-Vela, Francisco A., López Fernández, Aurelio, García-Torres, Miguel, Divina, Federico
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/175388
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/175388
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-025-06725-6
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Biclustering
Big data
High Performance Computing
Bioinformatics
Descripción
Sumario:Recommender Systems help users in making decision in different fields such as purchases or what movies to watch. User Based Collaborative Filtering (UBCF) approach is one of the most commonly used techniques for developing these soft ware tools. It is based on the idea that users who have previously shared similar tastes will almost certainly share similar tastes in the future. As a result, determining the nearest users to the one for whom recommendations are sought (active user) is critical. However, the massive growth of online commercial data has made this task especially difficult. As a result, Biclustering techniques have been used in recent years to perform a local search for the nearest users in subgroups of users with similar rating behaviour under a subgroup of items (biclusters), rather than searching the entire rating database. Nevertheless, due to the large size of these databases, the number of biclusters generated can be extremely high, making their processing very complex. In this paper we propose BinRec, a novel UBCF approach based on Biclustering. BinRec simplifies the search for neighbouring users by determining which ones are nearest to the active user based on the number of biclusters shared by the users. Experimental results show that BinRec outperforms other state-of-the-art recommender systems, with a remarkable improvement in environments with high data sparsity. The flexibility and scalability of the method position it as an efficient alternative for common collaborative filtering problems such as sparsity or cold-start.