A Hybrid Recommender System Combining Collaborative Filtering with Utility Mining

Based on a variety of information sources, recommender systems can identify specific items for various user interests. Techniques for recommender systems are classified into two types: personalized and non-personalized. Personalized algorithms are based on individual user preferences or collaborative filtering data; as the system learns more about the user, the recommendations will become more satisfying. They do, however, suffer from data sparsity and cold start issues. On the other hand, non-personalized algorithms make recommendations based on the importance of the items in the database; they are very useful when the system has no information about a specific user. Their accuracy, however, is limited by the issue of personalization. In most cases, one of the recommendation categories can be used to make recommendations. Yet, it is a challenge to evaluate the importance of items to the user while simultaneously using personalized and non-personalized preferences functions and ranking a set of candidate items based on these functions. This paper addresses this issue and improves recommendation quality by introducing a new hybrid recommendation technique. The proposed hybrid recommendation technique combines the importance of items to the user obtained by the utility mining method with the similarity weights of items produced by the collaborative filtering technique to make the recommendation process more reasonable and accurate. This technique can provide appropriate recommendations whether or not users have previous purchasing histories. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed hybrid recommendation technique outperforms both implemented collaborative filtering and utility-based recommendation techniques.