A Scalable, Accurate Hybrid Recommender System

Abstract

Recommender systems apply machine learning techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given resource. There are three main types of recommender systems: collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and demographic recommender systems. Collaborative filtering recommender systems recommend items by taking into account the taste (in terms of preferences of items) of users, under the assumption that users will be interested in items that users similar to them have rated highly. Content-based filtering recommender systems recommend items based on the textual information of an item, under the assumption that users will like similar items to the ones they liked before. Demographic recommender systems categorize users or items based on their personal attribute and make recommendation based on demographic categorizations. These systems suffer from scalability, data sparsity, and cold-start problems resulting in poor quality recommendations and reduced coverage. In this paper, we propose a unique cascading hybrid recommendation approach by combining the rating, feature, and demographic information about items. We empirically show that our approach outperforms the state of the art recommender system algorithms, and eliminates recorded problems with recommender systems.