A Collaborative Filtering Algorithm Employing Genetic Clustering to Ameliorate the Scalability Issue

Collaborative filtering technologies are facing two major challenges: scalability and recommendation quality, which are two goals in conflict. Nowadays more studies are focusing on the quality issue but less on the scalability one. We introduce a genetic clustering algorithm to partition the source data, guaranteeing that the intra-similarity is high but the inter-similarity is low. The clustering process is off-line running. Our empirical results show that the genetic clustering based collaborative filtering recommender system outperforms the memory-based one in scalability, and outperforms the k-means clustering based one and the memory-based one in recommendation quality