FARS: Fuzzy Ant based Recommender System for Web Users

Recommender systems are useful tools which provide an adaptive web environment for web users. Nowadays, having a user friendly website is a big challenge in e-commerce technology. In this paper, applying the benefits of both collaborative and content based filtering techniques is proposed by presenting a fuzzy recommender system based on collaborative behavior of ants (FARS). FARS works in two phases: modeling and recommendation. First, user’s behaviors are modeled offline and the results are used in second phase for online recommendation. Fuzzy techniques provide the possibility of capturing uncertainty among user interests and ant based algorithms provides us with optimal solutions. The performance of FARS is evaluated using log files of “Information and Communication Technology Center” of Isfahan municipality in Iran and compared with ant based recommender system (ARS). The results shown are promising and proved that integrating fuzzy Ant approach provides us with more functional and robust recommendations

Choice of Metrics used in Collaborative Filtering and their Impact on Recommender Systems

The capacity of recommender systems to make correct predictions is essentially determined by the quality and suitability of the collaborative filtering that implements them. The common memory-based metrics are Pearson correlation and cosine, however, their use is not always the most appropriate or sufficiently justified. In this paper, we analyze these two metrics together with the less common mean squared difference (MSD) to discover their advantages and drawbacks in very important aspects such as the impact when introducing different values of k-neighborhoods, minimization of the MAE error, capacity to carry out a sufficient number of predictions, percentage of correct and incorrect predictions and behavior when attempting to recommend the n-best items. The paper lists the results and practical conclusions that have been obtained after carrying out a comparative study of the metrics based on 135 experiments on the MovieLens database of 100,000 ratios

Discovering the Impact of Knowledge in Recommender Systems: A Comparative Study

Recommender systems engage user profiles and appropriate filtering techniques to assist users in finding more relevant information over the large volume of information. User profiles play an important role in the success of recommendation process since they model and represent the actual user needs. However, a comprehensive literature review of recommender systems has demonstrated no concrete study on the role and impact of knowledge in user profiling and filtering approache. In this paper, we review the most prominent recommender systems in the literature and examine the impression of knowledge extracted from different sources. We then come up with this finding that semantic information from the user context has substantial impact on the performance of knowledge based recommender systems. Finally, some new clues for improvement the knowledge-based profiles have been proposed.Comment: 14 pages, 3 tables; International Journal of Computer Science & Engineering Survey (IJCSES) Vol.2, No.3, August 201