Recommendation System for a Delivery Food Application Based on Number of Orders

Abstract

With the recent growth in food-delivery applications, creating new recommendation systems tailored to this platform is essential. State-of-the-art restaurant recommendation systems are based on users’ ratings or reviews, with data that are obtained from questionnaires or online platforms such as TripAdvisor, Zomato, Foursquare, or Yield. However, not all users give ratings or reviews after their purchase. This document proposes a recommendation system whose input is the number of orders stored by a real food-delivery application. These data are always available for all food-delivery applications and are stored all the time. Our proposal is based on the nearest-neighbor technique that calculates the client’s preferred restaurants and analyzes other clients with similar buying patterns. In addition, we propose a performance metric that can be used for this specific recommendation system that is based on real restaurant sales. We use a real dataset (available online) to validate our proposal. Based on our experiments, the recommendation system successfully gives only an average of 7.7 options from 187 that are available. We compared our proposal with other state-of-the-art recommendation techniques and obtained a better performance. Our results indicate that it is possible to generate recommendations based on the number of orders, making the use of a restaurant-recommendation system feasible in a real food-delivery application.