Utilizing Fuzzy Logic for Recommender Systems

Many of the current successful commercial recommender systems utilize collaborative filtering techniques. This technique recommends products to the active user based on product preference history of the neighbor users. Those users with similar preferences to the active user are typically named his/her neighbors. Hence, finding neighbors is critical to performance of the system. Although much effort for developing similarity measures has been devoted in the literature, there leaves a lot to be improved, especially in the aspect of handling subjectivity or vagueness in user preference ratings. This paper addresses this problem and presents a novel similarity measure using fuzzy logic for selecting neighbors. Experimental studies are conducted to reveal that the proposed measure achieved significant performance improvement.