International Journal of Computer Systems (ISSN: 2394-1065), Volume 03 Issue 02, February, 2016

Available at http://www.ijcsonline.com/

Recommender Systems: A Survey

Sharu Vinayak, Rahul Singh
Computer Science and Engineering,
Chandigarh University, Mohali, Punjab, India

Abstract
The development of recommender systems and web go hand in hand. Recommender systems try to minimize information
overload and perpetuate customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user likings . Although
these systems have grown out from the concept of information retrieval and filtering , with time it has successfully
propagated into a authentic and challenging research area itself. Recommender systems have always been related to
content based filtering versus collaborative filtering. Recommendations, however, are not made in void , but rather
devised within an informal community of users and social context. Recommender Systems are therefore a subclass of
information filtering systems that attempt to estimate the rating or preference that a user might give to an item or social
elements that he may not had considered yet, using a model built from the characteristics of an item or the users social
environment. This article gives an overview about recommender systems and their evolution as well as the various
methods and algorithms related to them.
Keyword-Content Based, Collaborative, Demographic, Information Retrieval, Recommender Systems

I.

INTRODUCTION

systems are usually studied according to whether

recommendations are content based or collaborative. The
most exaggerated and popular modeling dichotomy is
content-based filtering vs. collaborative filtering . Contentbased filtering involves recommending items based upon
the description of items and a profile of the users
interests.; e.g., if you liked Mahout In Action, you also
might be interested in Apache Mahout Cookbook. Where
As Collaborative filtering ,involves recommending those
items that the users, whose tastes are similar to the user
seeking recommendation, have liked; e.g., Mary and Maya
like The Amazing Spiderman. Mary also likes Batman
Returns. Maya
also might like Batman Returns.
Recommender systems, however, have an inherently social
element and ultimately bring people togethera viewpoint
under-emphasized in the literatureand therefore should
be surveyed from this perspective.

Since emergence of the first paper on collaborative

filtering in the mid-1990s Recommender Systems(RS)
have become an important research field. RS imparts
advice to users about items they might like to buy or
examine. Recommendations made by such systems can
help users navigate through large information spaces of
product descriptions, news articles or other items. RS are
software contrivances and tactics that provide suggestions
for items to be of use to a user. The purpose of a
recommender system is to generate meaningful
recommendations for items or products to a collection of
users that might interest them. Real world examples of the
operation of industry-strength recommender systems are
suggestions for books on Amazon, or movies on Netflix .
Features like age ,gender ,location ,followers ,tweets ,
posts etc. of the user may be used by the RS to collect
A. Recommender System Process
information about the user and hence produce effective
recommendations. In the recent times, RS implementation The three main phases of a RS process are as shown in
in the Internet has increased, which has facilitated its use figure 1.
in diverse areas [18]. The study about movie Information collection phase: Relevant information
recommendations is the most common and focused
about the users is collected in order to generate user
amongst various research papers ; however, apart from this
profiles or models for accomplishing recommendation
a great amount of RS literature is centred on different
tasks including users attributes, their behaviors or the
topics, like music [18,16,20], television [21,18], books
content of the resources accessed by the user.
[22,23], documents [6,15,14,16], e-learning [5,13], e- Learning phase: Learning algorithms are applied in
commerce [8,12], applications in markets [10] and web
this phase in order to filter and exploit the users
search [7].
features from the feedback gathered in the previous
According to the researchers there are four main
phase.
dimensions that help in the study of recommender systems: Recommendation phase: Final phase of a recommender
how the system is (i) modeled and designed (i.e., are system process which recommends the kind of items that
recommendations content based or collaborative?), (ii) may be preferred by the user . This can be done either
targeted (to an individual, group, or topic), (iii) built, and through the activities of the user that the system has
(iv) maintained (online vs. offline) [10]. Recommender

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Sharu Vinayak et al.

Recommender Systems :A Survey

observed or using the dataset collected in the initial phase ,

dataset can be both memory or model based.

extend general descriptions on the traditional taxonomies,

algorithms, methods, various filtering approaches,
databases, etc.
A. Basic Principles

Information
Phase

The process of generating recommendations is based on a

combination of the following analysis :

Learning Phase
Feedback

Recommendation
Phase

Figure 1. Recommender System Process

B. Categories Of Recommender Systems

Broadly there are two categories of RSs , namely

Personalized RSs: Personalization in general is defined as
the manner in which relevant information and services can
be tailored from a vast set of information and services that
matches the unique and specific needs of an individual or
a community. In these type of RSs the users are requested
for their
explicit and implicit needs in order to
recommend items or products to them. Usually Ecommerce sites make use of this category of RSs in order
to suggest items to their customers. Ebay.com is one of the
most popular example. These techniques are helpful to
the sites such that they can spread overall the internet to
adapt themselves to the requirements of each customer
hence resulting in a personalized recommendation for each
of them.
Non Personalized RSs: This type of RSs dont seek user
needs. They make recommendations either on the basis of
top-ratings or showing same stuff to two different users
who might be seeing them at the same time or different
time. Such RSs are used because sometimes there is no
knowledge about the identity of the user and also about
what interests him. These systems are automatic and
require little customer effort in order to generate the
recommendations and are. Non-personalized recommender
systems recommend products to customers based on what
other customers have said about the products on average.
The recommendations are independent of the customer, so
each customer gets the same recommendations. Nonpersonalized recommender systems are automatic, because
they require little customer effort to generate the
recommendations and are fugitive. Amazon.com and
Moviesfinder.com are examples of non-personalized RSs.

II.

BASIS OF RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

This section of the paper presents the most pertinent

notions on which the traditional RSs are based. Here, we

The type of data available in the database (e.g., ratings

given by the user , users registration information,
attributes and content for the items that can be ranked,
social relationships among users and location-aware
information).
The type of filtering algorithm being used (e.g.,
demographic, content-based, collaborative, socialbased, context-aware , utility based and hybrid).
The type of model chosen (e.g., based on direct use of
data i.e. memory-based, or a model generated using
such data i.e. model-based).
The employed techniques used to reduce sparsity
levels, etc.
Sparsity level of the database and the desired
scalability.
Performance of the system (time and space
consuming).
The objective pursued (e.g., predictions and top N
recommendations) as well as The expected quality of
the results (e.g., novelty, coverage and precision).
III.

RECOMMENDER SYSTEM APPROACHES

There exist several approaches of recommender systems

based on their functionality . Point of interest in this
discussion is not the kind of interface or the properties of
the users interaction with the recommender, but rather the
sources of data on which recommendation is based and the
use to which that data is put. Specifically, recommender
systems have
(i) The information that the system has
before the recommendation process begins, known as
background data,(ii) The information that user must
communicate to the system in order to generate a
recommendation ,known as input data and (iii) An
algorithm that combines background and input data to
arrive at its recommendations. In his work [25] A. Iskold
outlined four main approaches to recommendations
namely,(i) Personalized recommendation things are
recommended based on the user's past behaviour, (ii)
Social recommendation recommendations made are
based on the past behaviour of similar users , (iii) Item
recommendation items are recommended based on the
item itself and (iv) A combination of all the three
approaches.
On the basis of their internal functionality the
following approaches are being discussed in this paper :
A. Content Based Recommender Systems
In content based recommender systems instead of other
users ratings of the system , item recommendations are
made based upon either the description or the contents of
items. The content-based approach to recommendation has
its roots in information retrieval and information filtering

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Sharu Vinayak et al.

Recommender Systems :A Survey

research. Item to item correlation is employed for

generating recommendations rather than deriving a user
to item correlation and defining methodologies. Data
gathering is the first and foremost phase of
recommendation process in these systems. For example,
artist, album, genre etc. for music are some of the common
content information. Feature extraction and information
indexing are few techniques used in order to extract
content data. In these systems items are defined by their
associated features ; also the long-term models are
updated as more evident about user preferences .
BargainFinder and Jango are the websites that try to gather
information from various different web information
sources. PRES[12]
abbreviated for Personalized
Recommender System is a content based RS that
compares a user profile with the contents of each
document in the collection to make recommendations .
Figure 2.represents the basic architecture of content
based recommender systems.
User Profile

Recommender
Systems

Item
Description

Recommendations
Figure 2. Content Based Recommender Systems

Advantages :
user independence ;
transparency in explanations ;
no cold start.
Disadvantages:
limited content analysis content may not be
automatically extractable (multimedia) missing domain
knowledge keywords may not be sufficient
overspecialization more of the same, too similar
items new user ratings or information about user has
to be collected
B. Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems
Collaborative Filtering RSs allow users to give ratings
about a set of items (e.g. videos, songs, movies, books, etc.
in a CF based website)so that when there is enough
information stored on the system, recommendations to
each user can be made based on the information provided
by those users considering the most things in common
with them. User ratings can also be acquired implicitly
(e.g., number of times a song is heard). The k Nearest
Neighbors (kNN) is the most widely and commonly used
algorithm for collaborative filtering .In CF time-based
discounting of ratings is used.
CF is of two types :

User Based Collaborative Filtering(UBCF): in this

type of CF items are recommended by finding out
similar users. But it is often harder to scale because of
the dynamic nature of the user. UBCF is also called as
memory based collaborative filtering. Memory-based
type of algorithms are also known as the nearest
neighbors method, being the first technique to be
employed in this category. When computing the
recommendation, the whole set of user ratings is
processed because the opinions of the current user are
compared with the ones of all the other users in order to
find the neighbors (users with the most similar
opinions) [2].

Item Based Collaborative Filtering (IBCF):IBCF is

also called as model-based collaborative filtering or
techniques. Model-based techniques use a different
strategy, mainly to minimize some weaknesses of the
memory-based methods. Model-based methods use data
mining techniques to develop a model of user ratings,
which is used to predict user preferences[2].
Recommendations are made by calculating the
correlation similarities between the items. It is easy to
compute the same offline to because items usually dont
change much.

C. Hybrid Recommender Systems

This approach is a combination of multiple methods or
approaches. The main agenda behind the introduction of
this approach is to cope up with the problem of
conventional recommender systems. Hybrid approach is
further classified as:
Weighted Hybrid Approach : In this scores/votes of
several recommendation techniques are combined
together in order to produce a single recommendation.
Switching Hybrid Approach : In this the system
switches between various recommendation techniques
depending upon the current scenario.
Mixed Hybrid Approach : This approach presents
recommendations
from
several
different
recommendations at the same time.
Feature combination hybrid approach : Various
features from different recommendation data sources
are thrown together into a single recommendation
algorithm
Cascade Hybrid Approach : The recommendations
given by one recommender are refined by another
recommender .
Feature Augmentation Hybrid Approach : Output from
one technique is used as an input feature to another.
Meta-level Hybrid Approach : The model learned by
one recommender is used as input to another
D. Demographic Recommender Systems
Also known as Location Aware Recommender Systems.
These recommend items based on the demographic profile
of the user. It supposes that for different demographic by
places different recommendations must be introduced. It
provides simple and effective solutions. In the marketing
literature it is quite literature but proper RSs research in
this is relatively little.

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Recommender Systems :A Survey

E. Knowledge Based Recommender Systems

These are specific types of RSs that are used in scenarios
where approaches such as CBF and CF cannot be applied.
These can be often conversational i.e. User requirements
are drawn within the scope of the feedback loop
.Application domains for knowledge based recommender
systems : expensive items, not frequently purchased, few
ratings (car, house) time span important (technological
products) explicit requirements of user (vacation)
collaborative filtering unusable not enough data content
based similarity not sufficient constraint-based
explicitly defined conditions case-based similarity to
specified requirements conversational recommendations
.The major merit of this approach is the non-existence of
cold start crunch. The need of defining
Recommendation knowledge in an explicit manner
triggers the knowledge acquisition bottlenecks which is a
drawback.
F. Community Based Recommender Systems
This type of approach is a good solution to the cold start
crunch. In order to extract the information about the user
and fill the gaps existing between the cold start problem
and thus find the similarities between the users social
networks are used.
G. Semantic Based Recommender Systems
With this approach RSs can generate more accurate
results. It can be stated as a general approach for digital
assistants in the field of self servicing and e-care. It is a
good approach that can help the vendors of various
services nad products in increasing the customer
satisfaction. The FAQ systems are one of the examples of
this approach that uses this approach in order to find out
the right answers as well as the right questions and
corresponding sections of the technical documentations.
H. Metrics For Evaluating Recommender Systems
The goodness of a recommender system can be evaluated
by comparing its results with a test set comprising of
known user ratings. Predictive accuracy metrics [28] are
used to measure these systems, where there is a direct
comparison between predicted ratings and actual user
ratings. Mean Absolute Error(MAE) is the most
commonly used metric , defined as the average absolute
difference between predicted ratings and actual ratings. A.
Umanets et al. in their work [29] have used this parameter
in order to find the most appropriate algorithm out of
SlopeOne ,Eucledian , LogLikeLihood etc. for the system
that they have designed.
Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) is another commonly
used metric , that puts more emphasis on larger absolute
errors.
Other evaluation metrics are Precision, Recall and Area
Under the ROC Curve (AUC) that can be used to
discriminate between the good and the bad items in
context to information retrieval.
IV.

RESEARCH CHALLENGES IN
RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

The Netflix Prize[30] gave a boost the recommendation

research. There are a lot of good quality research papers

on how to predict a 1-5 rating for items from a dataset of

previous ratings[31]. That is one field that seems to be
saturated, but there are lots of open problems:
Cross-Domain
Recommendation:
Current
systems might be
really effective at learning
preferences in a domain (say books or movies ), but for
the other domains the algorithms might not function
that effectively . For e.g. if you like comedy and fiction
in books, what does it say about your taste in movies?
It would be really fascinating to see how preferences in
one domain can be used to judge preferences for the
other domain.
Constraint-Based Recommendation: Most of the
research is focused on virtual goods like books ,
movies and music, where an item can be recommended
n number of times. In the real world, its completely
not the same . For e.g. Recommending a good
restaurant to more number of people than it can handle,
it might face trouble to cope up with the load and it's
service may decline . How are recommendations made
in domains where items are limited? This challenge of
recommendation becomes a relaxed version of
becomes a relaxed version of the classic matching
problem.
Group Recommendations: The basic assertion is
to recommend an item to a group of people. Individual
recommendations are computed using typical models
the results are then combined using a smart way. But
often there might be disagreements, as different
groups may have different dynamics.
Impact of Recommendations: The rating
tendencies of individuals are surely effected by
recommendations. There has been a little research on
the effect of recommendations on our preferences. For
e.g. if I am told to buy an item that is liked by 99% of
the users whose taste is similar to that of mine?
Recommendation and Social Networks: "Social"
recommendation seems to being an emerging trend in
the current research field. Social features are used by
many companies in order to provide recommendations
based on ones friend's preferences and other network
characteristics. E.g. A and 20 others like an item X.
However, little is understood about how social
interactions influence peoples preferences about an
item and other things. Further, social networks
themselves act as vehicles of information, diffusing
ideas and information across the network. This means
that user preferences in a network are not only
dynamic, they have an interdependency with the
network .How do you design recommender models in
social contexts?
Context-aware
Recommendation: With
the
proliferation in the
use of mobile devices, users
themselves disclose a lot of contextual information,
like location, current activity etc. These data sources
provide real-time information, that are both an
opportunity and challenge for a recommender system.
Recommendation and Privacy: A major concern
in recommendation is privacy. There is need for
models that can guarantee privacy for certain designs
of recommender systems. Also, the tradeoff between

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Recommender Systems :A Survey

usability and privacy concerns of recommendations are

important to be understood, so as to design more
privacy concerned systems.
Recommendation
as
Intelligent
Task
Routing: This is a new field (in Cyber Security) which
discusses the growth of online communities. Wikipedia
is a good example, which is currently trying hard to
attract new editors.
V.

CONCLUSION

To extract out relevant information from the overload of

online available information recommender systems are
proving to be a good tool. The evolution of the web is
accompanied by its evolution. The method of data
collection in recommender systems varied from generation
to generation like ,collecting information from content
based data from purchased or used products in the first
generation to using web 3.0 in the third generation. As the
use of internet and mobile devices is increasing day by day
and so is the amount of online information , recommender
systems is an interesting research field to deal with. In this
paper we reviewed various recommender system
approaches and research challenges.
In future the main agenda is to design a cross domain
recommender system using social networks.
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