CF4CF: Recommending Collaborative Filtering algorithms using Collaborative Filtering.

As Collaborative Filtering becomes increasingly important in both academia and industry recommendation solutions, it also becomes imperative to study the algorithm selection task in this domain. This problem aims at finding automatic solutions which enable the selection of the best algorithms for a new problem, without performing full-fledged training and validation procedures. Existing work in this area includes several approaches using Metalearning, which relate the characteristics of the problem domain with the performance of the algorithms. This study explores an alternative approach to deal with this problem. Since, in essence, the algorithm selection problem is a recommendation problem, we investigate the use of Collaborative Filtering algorithms to select Collaborative Filtering algorithms. The proposed approach integrates subsampling landmarkers, a data characterization approach commonly used in Metalearning, with a Collaborative Filtering methodology, named CF4CF. The predictive performance obtained by CF4CF using benchmark recommendation datasets was similar or superior to that obtained with Metalearning.