Book Recommendation System Based on Collaborative Filtering: User-Based, Item-Based, and Singular Value Decomposition Analysis
Abstract
Recommender systems have become essential in the digital era to help users navigate overwhelming content. This study develops a book recommendation system using three collaborative filtering methods: user-based, item-based, and matrix factorization using singular value decomposition. We evaluate the system on a real-world dataset of 1,149,780 book ratings from 278,858 users across 271,360 books. A subset of 500 active users is used for experimental evaluation. The models are assessed using root mean square error and mean absolute error to measure rating prediction accuracy. The results show that the item-based collaborative filtering method achieves the best accuracy (root mean square error 7.362; mean absolute error 6.761), slightly outperforming the user-based approach (7.365; 6.809) and the matrix factorization method (7.643; 7.413). We analyze the results to understand the performance differences, noting the stability of item similarity as a key factor and the need for optimal tuning in the matrix factorization model. In conclusion, item-based collaborative filtering proved most effective for this context. This work provides insights into the comparative performance of foundational recommendation techniques and highlights practical considerations for improving book recommender systems.
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