• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.33 no.11
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• pp.953-964
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• 2006

Due to the usefulness of the collaborative filtering, it has been widely used in both the research and commercial field. However, there are still some challenges for it to be more efficient, especially the scalability problem, the sparsity problem and the cold start problem. In this paper. we address these problems and provide a novel distributed approach based on agents collaboration for the problems. We have tried to solve the scalability problem by making each agent save its users ratings and broadcast them to the users friends so that only friends ratings and his own ratings are kept in an agents local database. To reduce quality degradation of recommendation caused by the lack of rating data, we introduce a method using friends opinions instead of real rating data when they are not available. We also suggest a collaborative filtering algorithm based on user profile to provide new users with recommendation service. Experiments show that our suggested approach is helpful to the new user problem as well as is more scalable than traditional centralized CF filtering systems and alleviate the sparsity problem.