UsCoTc: Improved Collaborative Filtering (CFL) recommendation methodology using user confidence, time context with impact factors for performance enhancement

In today’s society, time is considered more valuable than money, and researchers often have limited time to find relevant papers for their research. Identifying and accessing essential information can be a challenge in this situation. To address this, the personalized suggestion system has been developed, which uses a user’s behavior data to suggest relevant items. The collaborative filtering strategy has been used to provide a user with the top research articles based on their queries and similarities with other users’ questions, thus saving time by avoiding time-consuming searches. However, when rating data is abundant but sparse, the usual method of determining user similarity is relatively straightforward. Furthermore, it fails to account for changes in users’ interests over time resulting in poor performance. This research proposes a new similarity measure approach that takes both user confidence and time context into account to increase user similarity computation. The experimental results show that the proposed technique works well with sparse data, and improves accuracy by 16.2% compared to existing models, especially during prediction. Furthermore, it enhances the quality of recommendations.