Improving rating estimation in recommender using demographic data and expert opinions

Memory-based collaborative filtering algorithms have been widely adopted in many popular recommender systems, however the rating data are very sparse, which affects prediction accuracy greatly. To solve this problem, we use expert opinions to improve prediction accuracy. Firstly, we propose a novel similarity measure in order to highlight users' background. Then, combining users' ratings with expert opinions, the prediction get a right balance in both expert professional opinions and similar users. Finally, since SVD-based collaborative filtering algorithms shows good performance on the prevention of noise, we use it to smooth the prediction. Experiments of MovieLens have shown that our proposed method improves recommendation quality obviously.