A multi-criteria recommendation system using dimensionality reduction and Neuro-Fuzzy techniques

Multi-criteria collaborative filtering (MC-CF) presents a possibility to provide accurate recommendations by considering the user preferences in multiple aspects of items. However, scalability and sparsity are two main problems in MC-CF which this paper attempts to solve them using dimensionality reduction and Neuro-Fuzzy techniques. Considering the user behavior about items’ features which is frequently vague, imprecise and subjective, we solve the sparsity problem using Neuro-Fuzzy technique. For the scalability problem, higher order singular value decomposition along with supervised learning (classification) methods is used. Thus, the objective of this paper is to propose a new recommendation model to improve the recommendation quality and predictive accuracy of MC-CF and solve the scalability and alleviate the sparsity problems in the MC-CF. The experimental results of applying these approaches on Yahoo!Movies and TripAdvisor datasets with several comparisons are presented to show the enhancement of MC-CF recommendation quality and predictive accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that SVM dominates the K-NN and FBNN in improving the MC-CF predictive accuracy evaluated by most broadly popular measurement metrics, F1 and mean absolute error. In addition, the experimental results also demonstrate that the combination of Neuro-Fuzzy and dimensionality reduction techniques remarkably improves the recommendation quality and predictive accuracy of MC-CF in relation to the previous recommendation techniques based on multi-criteria ratings.