Handling Incomplete Data Problem in Collaborative Filtering System

Collaborative filtering is one of the methodologies that are most widely used for recommendation system. It is based on a data matrix of each customer's preferences of products. There could be a lot of missing values in such preference data matrix. This incomplete data is one of the reasons to deteriorate the accuracy of recommendation system. There are several treatments to deal with the incomplete data problem such as case deletion and single imputation. Those approaches are simple and easy to implement but they may provide biased results. Multiple imputation method imputes m values for each missing value. It overcomes flaws of single imputation approaches through considering the uncertainty of missing values. The objective of this paper is to suggest multiple imputation-based collaborative filtering approach for recommendation system to improve the accuracy in prediction performance. The experimental works show that the proposed approach provides better performance than the traditional Collaborative filtering approach, especially in case that there are a lot of missing values in dataset used for recommendation system.