On Recommendation of Learning Objects using Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The e-learning recommender system in learning institutions is increasingly becoming the preferred mode of delivery, as it enables learning anytime, anywhere. However, delivering personalised course learning objects based on learner preferences is still a challenge. Current mainstream recommendation algorithms, such as the Collaborative Filtering (CF) and Content-Based Filtering (CBF), deal with only two types of entities, namely users and items with their ratings. However, these methods do not pay attention to student preferences, such as learning styles, which are especially important for the accuracy of course learning objects prediction or recommendation. Moreover, several recommendation techniques experience cold-start and rating sparsity problems. To address the challenge of improving the quality of recommender systems, in this paper a novel recommender algorithm for machine learning is proposed, which combines students actual rating with their learning styles to recommend Top-N course learning objects (LOs). Various recommendation techniques are considered in an experimental study investigating the best technique to use in predicting student ratings for e-learning recommender systems. We use the Felder-Silverman Learning Styles Model (FSLSM) to represent both the student learning styles and the learning object profiles. The predicted rating has been compared with the actual student rating. This approach has been experimented on 80 students for an online course created in the MOODLE Learning Management System, while the evaluation of the experiments has been performed with the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). The results of the experiment verify that the proposed approach provides a higher prediction rating and significantly increases the accuracy of the recommendation

User's Privacy in Recommendation Systems Applying Online Social Network Data, A Survey and Taxonomy

Recommender systems have become an integral part of many social networks and extract knowledge from a user's personal and sensitive data both explicitly, with the user's knowledge, and implicitly. This trend has created major privacy concerns as users are mostly unaware of what data and how much data is being used and how securely it is used. In this context, several works have been done to address privacy concerns for usage in online social network data and by recommender systems. This paper surveys the main privacy concerns, measurements and privacy-preserving techniques used in large-scale online social networks and recommender systems. It is based on historical works on security, privacy-preserving, statistical modeling, and datasets to provide an overview of the technical difficulties and problems associated with privacy preserving in online social networks.Comment: 26 pages, IET book chapter on big data recommender system

An interactive and interpretable interface for diversity in recommender systems

Offering diversity in the output of a recommender system is an active research question. Most of the current approaches focus on Top-N optimization, which results in poor user insight and accuracy trade-off. However, little is known about how an interactive interface can help with this issue. This pilot study shows that a multidimensional visualization promotes diversity among the recommended items. This finding motivated future work to provide diversity in recommender system by visualizing multivariate data through an interpretable and interactive interface. Copyright held by the owner/author(s)

A Comprehensive Survey on Comparisons across Contextual Pre-filtering, Contextual Post-filtering and Contextual Modelling Approaches

Recently, there has been growing interest in recommender systems (RS) and particularly in context-aware RS. Methods for generating context-aware recommendations are classified into pre-filtering, post-filtering and contextual modelling approaches. In this paper, we present the several novel approaches of the different variant of each of these three contextualization paradigms and present a complete survey on the state-of-the-art comparisons across them. We then identify the significant challenges that require being addressed by the current RS researchers, which will help academicians and practitioners in comparing these three approaches to select the best alternative according to their strategies