Recommendation system based on deep learning methods: a systematic review and new directions

These days, many recommender systems (RS) are utilized for solving information overload problem in areas such as e-commerce, entertainment, and social media. Although classical methods of RS have achieved remarkable successes in providing item recommendations, they still suffer from many issues such as cold start and data sparsity. With the recent achievements of deep learning in various applications such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and image processing, more efforts have been made by the researchers to exploit deep learning methods for improving the performance of RS. However, despite the several research works on deep learning based RS, very few secondary studies were conducted in the field. Therefore, this study aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) of deep learning based RSs that can guide researchers and practitioners to better understand the new trends and challenges in the field. This paper is the first SLR specifically on the deep learning based RS to summarize and analyze the existing studies based on the best quality research publications. The paper particularly adopts an SLR approach based on the standard guidelines of the SLR designed by Kitchemen-ham which uses selection method and provides detail analysis of the research publications. Several publications were gathered and after inclusion/exclusion criteria and the quality assessment, the selected papers were finally used for the review. The results of the review indicated that autoencoder (AE) models are the most widely exploited deep learning architectures for RS followed by the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and the Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) models. Also, the results showed that Movie Lenses is the most popularly used datasets for the deep learning-based RS evaluation followed by the Amazon review datasets. Based on the results, the movie and e-commerce have been indicated as the most common domains for RS and that precision and Root Mean Squared Error are the most commonly used metrics for evaluating the performance of the deep leaning based RSs.