Truncated SVD Collaborative Filtering

Question

I'm trying to implement collaborative Filtering by using sklearn truncatedSVD method. However, I receive very high rmse and it is because I receive very low ratings for every recommendation.

I perform truncatedSVD on a sparse matrix and I was wondering if this low recommendations are because the truncatedSVD accepts non-rated movies as 0 rated movies? If not, do you know what might cause low recommendations? Thanks!

Answer 1

So, it turned out to be that, if your data set's numeric values don't meaningfully start with zero you cannot apply truncatedSVd, without some adjustments. In case of movie ratings, which are from 1 to 5, you need to mean center the data, where you assign a meaning to zeros. Mean centering the data worked for me and I started to get reasonable rmse values.