Researchers at MIT “Devise Better Recommendation Algorithm”

From MIT News:

The recommendation systems at websites such as Amazon and Netflix use a technique called “collaborative filtering.” To determine what products a given customer might like, they look for other customers who have assigned similar ratings to a similar range of products, and extrapolate from there.
The success of this approach depends vitally on the notion of similarity. Most recommendation systems use a measure called cosine similarity, which seems to work well in practice. Last year, at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, MIT researchers used a new theoretical framework to demonstrate why, indeed, cosine similarity yields such good results.
This week, at the same conference, they are reporting that they have used their framework to construct a new recommendation algorithm that should work better than those in use today, particularly when ratings data is “sparse” — that is, when there is little overlap between the products reviewed and the ratings assigned by different customers.
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Using their analytic framework, the researchers showed that, in cases of sparse data — which describes the situation of most online retailers — their “neighbor’s-neighbor” algorithm should yield more accurate predictions than any known algorithm.

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