Enhancing Context-Aware Recommendation Using Hesitant Fuzzy Item Clustering by Stacked Autoencoder Based Smoothing Technique

Abstract

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) are a key component in businesses, notably in the e-transactions domain, since they assume that reviews, ratings, demographics, and other factors may determine customer preferences. On contrary, while evaluating the sentiment underlying the reviews and the rating score, consumers’ opinion is typically conflicting. As a result, a framework that employs either a review or a rating for top-N recommendation directs to produce unsatisfied recommendations in addition to a meager rating problem and high computation time. To overcome all the problems, a novel sentiment enhanced stacked autoencoder (SSAE) with context-specific hesitant fuzzy item hierarchical clustering (CHFHC) approach is proposed which employs online and offline phases. In the offline-phase, the meager user-item rating matrix is smoothed by learning the users’ concrete preference to a complete matrix by the SSAE approach. They are clustered offline using the CHFHC approach into context-based similar item clusters. In the online-phase, the active user gets context-based recommendations from the most similar cluster that matches the active users’ current context situation. Hence the SSAE_CHFHC approach improves the quality of Top-N recommendation corresponding to the exact contextual situation of the active user with a minimal recommendation computation time. Experiments on the (5-core) Amazon and yelp datasets proved that the intended SSAE_CHFHC framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms on a variety of evaluation measures.