Finding similar users using collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering refers to the process of identifying patterns among the objects in a dataset in order to make a decision about a new object. In the context of recommendation engines, we use collaborative filtering to provide recommendations by looking at similar users in the dataset.

Tip

By collecting the preferences of different users in the dataset, we collaborate that information to filter the users. Hence the name collaborative filtering.

The assumption here is that if two people have similar ratings for a particular set of movies, then their choices in a set of new unknown movies would be similar too. By identifying patterns in those common movies, we make predictions about new movies. In the previous section, we learned how to compare different users in the dataset. We will use these scoring techniques to find similar users in our dataset. Collaborative filtering is typically used when we have huge datasets. These methods can...