A Computational Model for Improving the Accuracy of Multi-criteria Recommender Systems

Artificial neural networks are complex biologically inspired algorithms made up of highly distributed, adaptive and self-organizing structures that make them suitable for optimization problems. They are made up of a group of interconnected nodes, similar to the great networks of neurons in the human brain. So far, artificial neural networks have not been applied to user modeling in multi-criteria recommender systems. This paper presents neural networks-based user modeling technique that exploits some of the characteristics of biological neurons for improving the accuracy of multi-criteria recommendations. The study was based upon the aggregation function approach that computes the overall rating as a function of the criteria ratings. The proposed technique was evaluated using different evaluation metrics, and the empirical results of the experiments were compared with that of the single rating-based collaborative filtering and two other similarity-based modeling approaches. The two similarity-based techniques used are: the worst-case and the average similarity techniques. The results of the comparative analysis have shown that the proposed technique is more efficient than the two similarity-based techniques and the single rating collaborative filtering technique.