Collaborative filtering algorithms recommend items to users based on the items liked by similar users. There are two main approaches: model-based builds a predictive model from user data, while memory-based identifies similar users and recommends popular items among them. The document describes memory-based collaborative filtering using cosine similarity to calculate user similarities based on common liked items, normalized by number of items per user. An example in R shows generating recommendations for a new user based on a training user-item matrix and similarity calculations.