Enhancing Recommendation Systems through SVD-based collaborative filtering and community detection

T Keerthika, Rajathi G Ignisha, Vedhapriyavadhana Rajamani, Surya Santhosh Kumar, Karthigai Selvam, M R Aiyyappan and L S Thoshi Babu

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 4, 1-12

Abstract: The recommendation systems often face challenges like low data density, scalability issues and absence of interpretability, whereas classical Collaborative Filtering (CF) which is based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) shows support by being scalable, weakened frequently in circumstances of extreme sparsity. Conversely, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are very accurate yet do not tend to have explanatory power. In a novel way, this research presents a hybrid framework that is a sequential combination of Louvain community identification using SVD-based collaborative filtering to overcome the sparsity-interpretable trade-off. It is unlike the existing models that utilize communities only, to pre-partition the user space, modularity-based clustering is employed to regularize it, enabling SVD to act on more dense homogeneous sub-matrices. This methodological contribution is a very useful way to cut down on computational noise and overhead and to make the community-level justifications of recommendations. In the experimental analysis, the Netflix Prize data set produced a Root-Mean-Square Error (RMSE) of 0.9966, a Mean value of 0.9966 and an Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.7968. This hybrid model achieves competitive predictive performance with significantly higher interpretability and lower computational cost than complex deep learning baselines, despite a modestly higher RMSE due to the deliberate trade-off for transparency and efficiency on extremely sparse data. The framework enables scalable and transparent recommendation engines suitable for large-scale sparse datasets.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0346579

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0346579

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