An algorithm for movie classification and recommendation using genre correlation

Collaborative filtering (CF), a technique used by recommendation systems, predicts and recommends items (information, products or services) that the user might like. Amazon.com’s recommender system is one of the most famous examples of CF. Recommendation systems are popular in both commercial and research sectors, and they are applied in a variety of applications such as movies, music, books, social connections and venues. In particular, movie recommendation systems produce personal recommendations for movies. Existing CF algorithms employed in movie recommendation systems predict the unknown rating of a given user for a movie using only the ratings (i.e., preferences) of other like-minded users who have seen the movie. In such approaches, there exist certain limits in improving the accuracy of recommendation systems. This paper proposes an algorithm for movie recommendation that exploits the genre of the movie to enhance the accuracy of rating predictions. The proposed algorithm 1) numerically measures the correlation between movie genres using movie rating information; 2) classifies movies using the genre correlations and generates a list of recommended movies for the target user with the classified movies; and finally 3) predicts the ratings of the movies in the list using traditional CF algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm yields higher accuracy in movie rating predictions than existing movie recommendation algorithms.