A new similarity-based multi-criteria recommendation algorithm based on autoencoders

Abstract

Recommender systems provide their users an efficient way to handle with information overload problem by offering personalized suggestions. Traditional recommender systems are based on two-dimensional user-item preference matrix which constructed depending on the users' overall evaluations over items. However, they have begun to present their preferences over under various circumstances. Thus, traditional recommendation techniques fail to process multicriteria ratings during the recommendation process. Multi-criteria recommender systems are an extension of traditional recommender systems that utilize multi-criteria-based user preferences. Multi-criteria recommender systems provide more personalized and accurate predictions compared to traditional recommender systems. However, the increased amount of data dimension causes sparsity to be a major problem of such systems. Especially, the similarity-based multi-criteria recommender systems may fail to find similar neighbors to an active user due to the lack of co-rated items among users.Therefore, we propose a new similarity-based multi-criteria collaborative filtering approach based on autoencoders. In order to handle with sparsity, the proposed method extracts non-linear, low-dimensional, dense features from raw and sparse users'/items' preferences. Our experimental outcomes show that the proposed work can amortize the negative impacts of sparsity over the accuracy comparing with the state-of-the-art multi-criteria recommendation techniques.