Improving Performance of Jaccard Coefficient for Collaborative Filtering

In recommender systems based on collaborative filtering, measuring similarity is very critical for determining the range of recommenders. Data sparsity problem is fundamental in collaborative filtering systems, which is partly solved by Jaccard coefficient combined with traditional similarity measures. This study proposes a new coefficient for improving performance of Jaccard coefficient by compensating for its drawbacks. We conducted experiments using datasets of various characteristics for performance analysis. As a result of comparison between the proposed and the similarity metric of Pearson correlation widely used up to date, it is found that the two metrics yielded competitive performance on a dense dataset while the proposed showed much better performance on a sparser dataset. Also, the result of comparing the proposed with Jaccard coefficient showed that the proposed yielded far better performance as the dataset is denser. Overall, the proposed coefficient demonstrated the best prediction and recommendation performance among the experimented metrics.