Multi-criteria collaborative filtering using rough sets theory

Abstract

Recommender systems have recently become a significant part of e-commerce applications. Through the different types of recommender systems, collaborative filtering is the most popular and successful recommender system for providing recommendations. Recent studies have shown that using multi-criteria ratings helps the system to know the customers better. However, bringing multi aspects to collaborative filtering causes new challenges such as scalability and sparsity. Additionally, revealing the relation between criteria is yet another optimization problem. Hence, increasing the accuracy in prediction is a challenge. In this paper, an aggregation-function based multi-criteria collaborative filtering system using Rough Sets Theory is proposed as a novel approach. Rough Sets Theory is used to uncover the relationship between the overall criterion and the individual criteria. Experimental results show that the proposed model (RoughMCCF) successfully improves the predictive accuracy without compromising on online performance.