Trust and fuzzy inference based cross domain serendipitous item recommendations (TFCDSRS)

Abstract

Recommender System (RS) is an information filtering approach that helps the overburdened user with information in his decision making process and suggests items which might be interesting to him. While presenting recommendation to the user, accuracy of the presented list is always a concern for the researchers. However, in recent years, the focus has now shifted to include the unexpectedness and novel items in the list along with accuracy of the recommended items. To increase the user acceptance, it is important to provide potentially interesting items which are not so obvious and different from the items that the end user has rated. In this work, we have proposed a model that generates serendipitous item recommendation and also takes care of accuracy as well as the sparsity issues. Literature suggests that there are various components that help to achieve the objective of serendipitous recommendations. In this paper, fuzzy inference based approach is used for the serendipity computation because the definitions of the components overlap. Moreover, to improve the accuracy and sparsity issues in the recommendation process, cross domain and trust based approaches are incorporated. A prototype of the system is developed for the tourism domain and the performance is measured using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), unexpectedness, precision, recall and F-measure.