A Multi Source Graph-Based Hybrid Recommendation Algorithm

Images that widely exist on e-commerce sites, social networks, and many other applications are one of the most important information resources integrated into the recently deployed image-based recommender systems. In the latest studies, researchers have jointly considered ratings and images to generate recommendations, many of which are still restricted to limited information sources, sources namely, ratings with another input data, or which require the pre-existence of domain knowledge to generate recommendations. In this paper, a new graph-based hybrid framework is introduced to generate recommendations and overcome these challenges. Firstly, a simple overview of the framework is provided and, then, two different information sources (visual images and numerical ratings) are utilized to describe how the proposed framework can be developed in practice. Furthermore, the users’ visual preferences are determined based on which item they have already purchased. Then, each user is represented as a visual feature vector. Finally, the similarity factors between the users or items are evaluated from the user visual-feature or item visual-feature matrices, to be included the proposed algorithm for more efficiency. The proposed hybrid recommendation method depends on a link prediction approach and reveals the significant potential for performance improvement in top-N recommendation tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed appraoch using three quality measurements - hit-ratio, recall, and precision - on the three subsets of the Amazon dataset, as well as its flexibility to incorporate different information sources. Finally, it is concluded that hybrid recommendation algorithms that use the integration of multiple types of input data perform better than previous recommendation algorithms that only utilize one type of input data.