A deep learning based trust- and tag-aware recommender system

Recommender systems are popular tools used in many applications, such as e-commerce, e-learning, and social networks to help users select their desired items. Collaborative filtering is a widely used recommendation technique that employs previous ratings of users to predict their future interests. Lack of sufficient ratings often reduces the performance of collaborative filtering recommendation methods. Additional side resources, such as trust relationships and tag information can be employed to enhance the recommendation accuracy. However, trust and tag data are often heavily sparse as users mainly provide insufficient information about these side resources. Moreover, such additional resources have generally large dimensions which result in increasing the computational complexity of recommendation models in calculating similarity values. To cope with these problems, a new recommendation model is proposed that utilizes deep neural networks to model the representation of trust relationships and tag information. To this end, a sparse autoencoder is used to extract latent features from user-user trust relationships and user-tag matrices. Then, the extracted latent features are utilized to calculate similarity values between users, which are then used to form the nearest neighbors of the target user and predict unseen items. The proposed method can tackle the data sparsity problem and reduce the computational complexity of recommender systems as the extracted latent features have smaller dimensions in comparison to the original data. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method and show its outperformance over state-of-the-art recommender systems. (C) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.