A framework for configuring collaborative filtering-based recommendations derived from purchase data

Abstract This study proposes a decision support framework to help e-commerce companies select the best collaborative filtering algorithms (CF) for generating recommendations on the basis of online binary purchase data. To create this framework, an experimental design applies several CF configurations, which are characterized by different data-reduction techniques, CF methods, and similarity measures, to binary purchase data sets with distinct input data characteristics, i.e., sparsity level, purchase distribution, and item–user ratio. The evaluations in terms of accuracy, diversity, computation time, and trade-offs among these metrics reveal that the best-performing algorithm in terms of accuracy remains consistent regardless of the input-data characteristics. However, for diversity and computation time, the best-performing model varies with the input characteristics. This framework allows e-commerce companies to decide on the optimal CF configuration as a function of their specific binary purchase data sets. They also gain insight into the impact of changes in the input data set on the preferred algorithm configuration.