Sometimes, the quality of the output is simply assessed by eyeballing it. Looking at the examples provided below, it's clear that the expected user ratings are 2 and 3 (please refer to the empty data cells).The examples are simplified - I've used much larger datasets and still harvested the same results.
Table 1
Users Movie 1 Movie 2 Movie 31 - 3 42 2 3 43 2 3 4
Table 2
Users Movie 1 Movie 2 Movie 31 - 3 32 3 3 33 3 3 3
The ALS model delivers exactly these ratings, but the SVD model fails miserably. Does anyone have any idea why that is? Why would we get results other than 2 and 3?