Hybrid Recommender Systems based on Content Feature Relationship

Abstract

Recommendation systems get ever-increasing importance due to their applications in both academia and industry. The most popular type of these systems, known as collaborative filtering algorithms, employ user-item interactions to perform the recommendation tasks. With growth of additional information sources other than the rating (or purchase) history of users on items, such as item descriptions and social media information, further extensions of these systems have been proposed, known as hybrid recommendation algorithms. Hybrid recommenders use both user-item interaction data and their contextual information. In this work, we propose new hybrid recommender algorithms by considering the relationship between content features. This relationship is embedded into the hybrid recommenders to improve their accuracy. We first introduce a novel method to extract the content feature relationship matrix, and then the collaborative filtering recommender is modified such that this relationship matrix can be effectively integrated within the algorithm. The proposed algorithm can better deal with the cold-start problem than the state-of-art algorithms. We also propose a novel content-based hybrid recommender system. Our experiments on a benchmark movie dataset show that the proposed approach significantly improves the accuracy of the system, while resulting in satisfactory performance in terms of novelty and diversity of the recommendation lists.