Building Switching Hybrid Recommender System Using Machine Learning Classifiers and Collaborative Filtering

Recommender systems apply machine learning and data mining techniques for filtering unseen information and can predict whether a user would like a given resource. To date a number of recommendation algorithms have been proposed, where collaborative filtering and content-based filtering are the two most famous and adopted recommendation techniques. Collaborative filtering recommender systems recommend items by identifying other users with similar taste and use their opinions for recommendation; whereas content-based recommender systems recommend items based on the content information of the items. Moreover, machine learning classifiers can be used for recommendation by training them on content information. These systems suffer from scalability, data sparsity, over specialization, and cold-start problems resulting in poor quality recommendations and reduced coverage. Hybrid recommender systems combine individual systems to avoid certain aforementioned limitations of these systems. In this paper, we proposed unique generalized switching hybrid recommendation algorithms that combine machine learning classifiers with the collaborative filtering recommender systems. Experimental results on two different data sets, show that the proposed algorithms are scalable and provide better performance—in terms of accuracy and coverage—than other algorithms while at the same time eliminate some recorded problems with the rec-ommender systems.