  In this paper, we analyze a collaborative filter that answers the simple
question: What is popular amongst your friends? While this basic principle
seems to be prevalent in many practical implementations, there does not appear
to be much theoretical analysis of its performance. In this paper, we partly
fill this gap. While recent works on this topic, such as the low-rank matrix
completion literature, consider the probability of error in recovering the
entire rating matrix, we consider probability of an error in an individual
recommendation (bit error rate (BER)). For a mathematical model introduced in
[1],[2], we identify three regimes of operation for our algorithm (named
Popularity Amongst Friends (PAF)) in the limit as the matrix size grows to
infinity. In a regime characterized by large number of samples and small
degrees of freedom (defined precisely for the model in the paper), the
asymptotic BER is zero; in a regime characterized by large number of samples
and large degrees of freedom, the asymptotic BER is bounded away from 0 and 1/2
(and is identified exactly except for a special case); and in a regime
characterized by a small number of samples, the algorithm fails. We also
present numerical results for the MovieLens and Netflix datasets. We discuss
the empirical performance in light of our theoretical results and compare with
an approach based on low-rank matrix completion.
