Content-based filtering advantages & disadvantages

Advantages

• The model doesn't need any data about other users, since the recommendations are specific to this user. This makes it easier to scale to a large number of users.
• The model can capture the specific interests of a user, and can recommend niche items that very few other users are interested in.

Disadvantages

• Since the feature representation of the items are hand-engineered to some extent, this technique requires a lot of domain knowledge. Therefore, the model can only be as good as the hand-engineered features.
• The model can only make recommendations based on existing interests of the user. In other words, the model has limited ability to expand on the users' existing interests.