Analysis of Data Imputation in Recommender Systems

Youngnam Lee, Sang-Wook Kim

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2017.44.12.1333

Recommender systems (RS) that predict a set of items a target user is likely to prefer have been extensively studied in academia and have been aggressively implemented by many companies such as Google, Netflix, eBay, and Amazon. Data imputation alleviates the data sparsity problem occurring in recommender systems by inferring missing ratings and adding them to the original data. In this paper, we point out the drawbacks of existing approaches and make suggestions for data imputation techniques. We also justify our suggestions through extensive experiments.