FPLV: Enhancing recommender systems with fuzzy preference, vector similarity, and user community for rating prediction

Rating prediction is crucial in recommender systems as it enables personalized recommendations based on different models and techniques, making it of significant theoretical importance and practical value. However, presenting these recommendations in the form of lists raises the challenge of improving the list’s quality, making it a prominent research topic. This study focuses on enhancing the ranking quality of recommended items in user lists while ensuring interpretability. It introduces fuzzy membership functions to measure user attributes on a multi-dimensional item label vector and calculates user similarity based on these features for prediction and recommendation. Additionally, the user similarity network is modeled to extract community information, leading to the design of a set of corresponding recommendation algorithms. Experimental results on two commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in enhancing list ranking quality, reducing prediction errors, and maintaining recommendation diversity and accurate user preference classification. This research highlights the potential of integrating heuristic methods with complex network theory and fuzzy techniques to enhance recommendation system performance with interpretability in mind.