Hybrid group recommendations for a travel service

Recommendation techniques have proven their usefulness as a tool to cope with the information overload problem in many classical domains such as movies, books, and music. Additional challenges for recommender systems emerge in the domain of tourism such as acquiring metadata and feedback, the sparsity of the rating matrix, user constraints, and the fact that traveling is often a group activity. This paper proposes a recommender system that offers personalized recommendations for travel destinations to individuals and groups. These recommendations are based on the users' rating profile, personal interests, and specific demands for their next destination. The recommendation algorithm is a hybrid approach combining a content-based, collaborative filtering, and knowledge-based solution. For groups of users, such as families or friends, individual recommendations are aggregated into group recommendations, with an additional opportunity for users to give feedback on these group recommendations. A group of test users evaluated the recommender system using a prototype web application. The results prove the usefulness of individual and group recommendations and show that users prefer the hybrid algorithm over each individual technique. This paper demonstrates the added value of various recommendation algorithms in terms of different quality aspects, compared to an unpersonalized list of the most-popular destinations

A Hybrid Web Recommendation System based on the Improved Association Rule Mining Algorithm

As the growing interest of web recommendation systems those are applied to deliver customized data for their users, we started working on this system. Generally the recommendation systems are divided into two major categories such as collaborative recommendation system and content based recommendation system. In case of collaborative recommen-dation systems, these try to seek out users who share same tastes that of given user as well as recommends the websites according to the liking given user. Whereas the content based recommendation systems tries to recommend web sites similar to those web sites the user has liked. In the recent research we found that the efficient technique based on asso-ciation rule mining algorithm is proposed in order to solve the problem of web page recommendation. Major problem of the same is that the web pages are given equal importance. Here the importance of pages changes according to the fre-quency of visiting the web page as well as amount of time user spends on that page. Also recommendation of newly added web pages or the pages those are not yet visited by users are not included in the recommendation set. To over-come this problem, we have used the web usage log in the adaptive association rule based web mining where the asso-ciation rules were applied to personalization. This algorithm was purely based on the Apriori data mining algorithm in order to generate the association rules. However this method also suffers from some unavoidable drawbacks. In this paper we are presenting and investigating the new approach based on weighted Association Rule Mining Algorithm and text mining. This is improved algorithm which adds semantic knowledge to the results, has more efficiency and hence gives better quality and performances as compared to existing approaches.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Recommender System Using Collaborative Filtering Algorithm

With the vast amount of data that the world has nowadays, institutions are looking for more and more accurate ways of using this data. Companies like Amazon use their huge amounts of data to give recommendations for users. Based on similarities among items, systems can give predictions for a new item’s rating. Recommender systems use the user, item, and ratings information to predict how other users will like a particular item. Recommender systems are now pervasive and seek to make profit out of customers or successfully meet their needs. However, to reach this goal, systems need to parse a lot of data and collect information, sometimes from different resources, and predict how the user will like the product or item. The computation power needed is considerable. Also, companies try to avoid flooding customer mailboxes with hundreds of products each morning, thus they are looking for one email or text that will make the customer look and act. The motivation to do the project comes from my eagerness to learn website design and get a deep understanding of recommender systems. Applying machine learning dynamically is one of the goals that I set for myself and I wanted to go beyond that and verify my result. Thus, I had to use a large dataset to test the algorithm and compare each technique in terms of error rate. My experience with applying collaborative filtering helps me to understand that finding a solution is not enough, but to strive for a fast and ultimate one. In my case, testing my algorithm in a large data set required me to refine the coding strategy of the algorithm many times to speed the process. In this project, I have designed a website that uses different techniques for recommendations. User-based, Item-based, and Model-based approaches of collaborative filtering are what I have used. Every technique has its way of predicting the user rating for a new item based on existing users’ data. To evaluate each method, I used Movie Lens, an external data set of users, items, and ratings, and calculated the error rate using Mean Absolute Error Rate (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Finally, each method has its strengths and weaknesses that relate to the domain in which I am applying these methods

A large multilingual and multi-domain dataset for recommender systems

This paper presents a multi-domain interests dataset to train and test Recommender Systems, and the methodology to create the dataset from Twitter messages in English and Italian. The English dataset includes an average of 90 preferences per user on music, books, movies, celebrities, sport, politics and much more, for about half million users. Preferences are either extracted from messages of users who use Spotify, Goodreads and other similar content sharing platforms, or induced from their ”topical” friends, i.e., followees representing an interest rather than a social relation between peers. In addition, preferred items are matched with Wikipedia articles describing them. This unique feature of our dataset provides a mean to derive a semantic categorization of the preferred items, exploiting available semantic resources linked to Wikipedia such as the Wikipedia Category Graph, DBpedia, BabelNet and others