Title: A fuzzy hybrid approach to enhance diversity in top-N recommendations

Authors: Majda Maatallah; Hassina Seridi-Bouchelaghem

Addresses: Laboratory of Electronic Document Management (LABGED), University of Badji Mokhtar Annaba, P.O. Box 12, 23000, Algeria ' Laboratory of Electronic Document Management (LABGED), University of Badji Mokhtar Annaba, P.O. Box 12, 23000, Algeria

Abstract: In recent researches, recommender systems performance was restricted in their ability to predict unseen items by users and recommending them those with the highest predicted ratings. To make good predictions it is not sufficient to judge the performance, because a good recommender should offer useful and diverse items that fit to different interest choices and tastes of users. Unfortunately, the lack of diversity and the stability in recommender systems over the user's profile dynamicity become a major challenge. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy hybrid diversified recommendation system able to generate multi-taste recommendations depending on the user's profile variation. Due to the fuzziness and uncertainty in user's profile, the system allows users belonging to different clusters using a fuzzy-based collaborative filtering combined with a content-based filtering algorithm. To identify the user's neighbourhood, a novel similarity measure is proposed. To increase diversity in recommended lists, subsets from Top-N recommended lists in similar clusters, are selected according to users membership degrees. Several experiments are conducted on Movilens dataset to prove the proposal's effectiveness.

Keywords: fuzzy recommender systems; diversity recommendation; neighbourhood selection; user profiles; user tastes; top-N recommendation; fuzzy logic; uncertainty; collaborative filtering; content based filtering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2015.070207

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2015 Vol.19 No.4, pp.505 - 530

Received: 09 Jan 2014
Accepted: 25 May 2014

Published online: 29 Jun 2015 *

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