A Novel Collaborative Filtering Approach Based on the Opposite Neighbors’ Preferences

Collaborative filtering (CF) has become an effective way to predict useful items. It is the most widespread recommendation technique. It relies on users who share similar tastes and preferences to suggest the items that they might be interested in. Despite its simplicity and justifiability, the collaborative filtering approach experiences many problems, including sparsity, gray sheep and scalability. These problems lead to deteriorating the accuracy of the obtained results. In this work, we present a novel collaborative filtering approach based on the opposite preferences of users. We focus on enhancing the accuracy of predictions and dealing with gray sheep problem by inferring new similar neighbors based on users who have dissimilar tastes and preferences. For instance, if a user X is dissimilar to a user Y then the user ┐X is similar to the user Y. The Experimental results performed on two datasets including MovieLens and FilmTrust show that our approach outperforms several baseline recommendation techniques. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020.