Evaluation of a Cascade Hybrid Recommendation as a Combination of One-Class Classification and Collaborative Filtering

Abstract

This paper decomposes the problem of recommendation into a two level cascade recommendation scheme which benefits from both content-based and collaborative filtering methodologies. The first level utilizes the content-based features of items in order to incorporate the individualized (subjective) user preferences within the recommendation process. This is achieved through the exploitation of the one-class classification paradigm which provides the means in order to filter out user specific undesirable items. The second level, on the other hand, serves the purpose of assigning particular rating degrees to the user-specific desirable items identified by the first level. The combination of two approaches in a cascade form, mimics the social process when someone has selected some items according to his preferences and asks for opinions about these by others, in order to achieve the best selection. Our experimentation provides significant evidence on the recommendation efficiency of the adapted hybrid approach which outperforms pure content-based and pure collaborative techniques.