-----Similarity of the Mahout series

There are many similarity implementations in the Mahout recommendation system that implement calculations that do not have a similarity between user or item. For data sources with different data volumes and data types, different similarity calculation methods are required to improve the recommended performance, and in Mahout, a large number of components for computing similarity are provided, each of which implements different computing sides of the similarity degree.

User Similarity:

Item Similarity:

Pearson degree of relevance

Class Name: Pearsoncorrelationsimilarity

Principle: A statistic used to reflect the degree of linear correlation of two variables

Range: [ -1,1], the greater the absolute value, the stronger the correlation, negative correlation for the recommended significance is small.

Note: 1, do not consider the number of overlapping, 2, if there is only one overlap, can not calculate the similarity (the calculation process is divided by n-1); 3. If the overlapping values are equal, the similarity can not be computed (the standard deviation is 0 and the divisor is divided).

This similarity is not the best choice, nor is it the worst choice, just because it is easy to understand and is often mentioned in early studies. The use of the Pearson linear correlation coefficients must assume that the data is obtained from the normal distribution in pairs, and that the data must be equal-spaced at least in the logical category. In Mahout, an extension is provided for Pearson-related calculations by adding a parameter to an enumeration type (Weighting) to make the overlap count an influence factor for the computational similarity. Euclidean distance similarity degree

Class Name: Euclideandistancesimilarity

Principle: The Similarity degree S,s=1/(1+D) is defined by Euclidean distance d.

Range: [0,1], the larger the value, the smaller the D, that is, the closer the distance, the greater the similarity.

Description: Similar to Pearson's, this similarity does not take into account the effect of overlapping numbers on the results, and similarly, the mahout by adding an enumeration type (Weighting) parameter to make the overlap number an influence factor of the computational similarity. Cosine similarity degree

Class Name: Pearsoncorrelationsimilarity and Uncenteredcosinesimilarity

Principle: The cosine of the angle between the two points of the multidimensional space and the set point.

Range: [ -1,1] The larger the value, the greater the angle, the farther apart the two points, the smaller the similarity.

Note: In the mathematical expression, if the attributes of two items are data- centric , the computed cosine similarity and Pearson similarity are the same, in Mahout, the data center process is realized, so Pearson similarity value is also the cosine similarity after data center. In addition, in the new version, Mahout provides the Uncenteredcosinesimilarity class as the cosine similarity for computing the non-centralized data. spearman rank correlation coefficient

Class Name: Spearmancorrelationsimilarity

Principle: Spearman rank correlation coefficients are generally considered to be the Pearson linear correlation coefficients between the arranged variables.

Range: { -1.0,1.0}, 1.0 when consistent, 1.0 for inconsistencies.

Description: Calculations are very slow and have a large number of sorts. For data sets in Recommender systems, it is inappropriate to use spearman rank correlation coefficients as similarity measures. Manhattan Distance

Class Name: Cityblocksimilarity

Principle: The realization of the Manhattan distance, similar to the continental distance, are used to measure the spatial distance of the multidimensional data

Range: [0,1], consistent with the European range, the smaller the value, the greater the distance value, the greater the similarity.

Description: Less than the Euclidean distance calculation, the performance is relatively high. Tanimoto coefficient

Class Name: Tanimotocoefficientsimilarity

Principle: Also known as generalized Jaccard coefficients, is the expansion of the Jaccard coefficient, the equation is

Range: [0,1], when full overlap is 1, no overlapping item is 0, the closer the 1 description is the more similar.

Description: Handle non-scoring preference data. Logarithmic likelihood similarity

Class Name: Loglikelihoodsimilarity

Principle: Number of overlapping, number of non-overlapping, no number

Scope: Specific to Baidu Library to find papers "accurate Methods for the Statistics of Surprise and coincidence"

Note: Processing the preference data without scoring is more intelligent than the calculation method of Tanimoto coefficient.