Food and Beverage Recommendation in EatAja Application Using the Alternating Least Square Method Recommender System

Abstract

EatAja is a startup in Indonesia that provides a mobile application-based food and beverage ordering solution for restaurants. The EatAja application uses transaction data to recommend food and beverage menus to customers. Previous studies have developed recommender systems using the Apriori and Collaborative Filtering methods. However, there are shortcomings in the recommendation system using both methods, i.e., the lack of personalization factors and low scalability. The learning method with matrix factorization can overcome the problem. In this study, we improve the food and beverage product recommender system in the EatAja application using the Alternating Least Square (ALS) matrix factorization method on Apache Spark. We will compare the results of the recommender system using the ALS method with the Collaborative Filtering method. The comparison uses the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) evaluation method. The results showed that the MAE value decreased by 0.07 with the ALS Matrix factorization method.