A Hybrid Recommender System for Gaussian Mixture Model and Enhanced Social Matrix Factorization Technology Based on Multiple Interests

Recommender systems are recently becoming more significant in the age of rapid development of the information technology and pervasive computing to provide e-commerce users’ appropriate items. In recent years, various model-based and neighbor-based approaches have been proposed, which improve the accuracy of recommendation to some extent. However, these approaches are less accurate than expected when users’ ratings on items are very sparse in comparison with the huge number of users and items in the user-item rating matrix. Data sparsity and high dimensionality in recommender systems have negatively affected the performance of recommendation. To solve these problems, we propose a hybrid recommendation approach and framework using Gaussian mixture model and matrix factorization technology. Specifically, the improved cosine similarity formula is first used to get users’ neighbors, and initial ratings on unrated items are predicted. Second, users’ ratings on items are converted into users’ preferences on items’ attributes to reduce the problem of data sparsity. Again, the obtained user-item-attribute preference data is trained through the Gaussian mixture model to classify users with the same interests into the same group. Finally, an enhanced social matrix factorization method fusing user’s and item’s social relationships is proposed to predict the other unseen ratings. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets are conducted and the results are compared with the existing major recommendation models. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the better performance compared to other techniques in accuracy.