A new user similarity model to improve the accuracy of collaborative filtering

•We first analyze the shortages of the existing similarity measures in collaborative filtering.•And second, we propose a new user similarity model to overcome these drawbacks.•We compare the new model with many other similarity measures on two real data sets.•Experiments show that the new model can reach better performance than many existing similarity measures. Collaborative filtering has become one of the most used approaches to provide personalized services for users. The key of this approach is to find similar users or items using user-item rating matrix so that the system can show recommendations for users. However, most approaches related to this approach are based on similarity algorithms, such as cosine, Pearson correlation coefficient, and mean squared difference. These methods are not much effective, especially in the cold user conditions. This paper presents a new user similarity model to improve the recommendation performance when only few ratings are available to calculate the similarities for each user. The model not only considers the local context information of user ratings, but also the global preference of user behavior. Experiments on three real data sets are implemented and compared with many state-of-the-art similarity measures. The results show the superiority of the new similarity model in recommended performance.