Credibility score based multi-criteria recommender system

Abstract

Recommender system has been emerged as a personalization tool to solve the issue of information overload in an e-commerce environment. Traditional collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems (RSs) suggest items to users based on their overall ratings which are used to find out similar users. Multi-criteria ratings are used to capture user preferences efficiently in multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRS), and incorporation of various criteria ratings can lead to higher performance in MCRS. Usually, user relies on the credibility of an item provided through his/her social circle or similar users, which is called a personal view on items from their close ones. However, it is not generally sufficient to depend exclusively on the personal view of the user. Therefore, public view that includes whole community can play a key role in the credibility of an item. In this paper, we propose a MCRS based on the credibility score of an item, which is an aggregated value of credibility scores on various criteria of an item. These credibility scores are computed based on personal and public views. However, different users have different priorities to various criteria of an item. Therefore, we use genetic algorithm (GA) to learn appropriate weights in the aggregation task of credibility score. The experiment results on Yahoo! Movies and modified MovieLens dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed credibility score based MCRS in terms of coverage, recall, precision, and f-measure.