Collaborative Filtering with the Simple Bayesian Classifier

Many collaborative filtering enabled Web sites that recommend books, CDs, movies, and so on, have become very popular on the Internet. They recommend items to a user based on the opinions of other users with similar tastes. In this paper, we discuss an approach to collaborative filtering based on the Simple Bayesian Classifier. We defme two variants of the recommendation problem for the Simple Bayesian Classifier. In our approach, we calculate the similarity between users from negative ratings and positive ratings separately. We evaluated these algorithms using databases of movie recommendations and joke recommendations. Our empirical results show that one of our proposed Bayesian approaches significandy outperforms a correlation-based collaborative filtering algorithm. The other model outperforms as well although it shows similar performance to the correlation-based approach in some parts of our experiments.