An anchor-based collaborative filtering system receives a training dataset including user-item interactions each identifying a user and an item that the user has positively interacted with. The system defines a vector space and distributes the items of the training dataset within the vector based on a determined similarity of the items. The system further defines a set of taste anchors that are each associated in memory with a subgroup of the items in a same neighborhood of the vector space. To make a recommendation to an individual user, the system identifies an anchor-based representation for the individual user that includes a subset of the defined taste anchors that best represents the types of items that the user has favorably interacted with in the past. The taste anchors included in the identified anchor-based representation for the individual user are used to make recommendations to the user in the future.