A New Recommendation Approach Based on Probabilistic Soft Clustering Methods: A Scientific Documentation Case Study

Recommender system (RS) clustering is an important issue, both for the improvement of the collaborative filtering (CF) accuracy and to obtain analytical information from their high sparse datasets. RS items and users usually share features belonging to different clusters, e.g., a musical-comedy movie. Soft clustering, therefore, is the CF clustering’s most natural approach. In this paper, we propose a new prediction approach for probabilistic soft clustering methods. In addition, we put to test a not traditional scientific documentation CF dataset: SD4AI, and we compare results with the MovieLens baseline. Not traditional CF datasets have challenging features, such as not regular rating frequency distributions, broad range of rating values, and a particularly high sparsity. The results show the suitability of using soft-clustering approaches, where their probabilistic overlapping parameters find optimum values when balanced hard/soft clustering is used. This paper opens some promising lines of research, such as RSs’ use in the scientific documentation field, the Internet of Things-based datasets processing, and design of new model-based soft clustering methods.