Integrating Multi-Criteria Collaborative Filtering and Trust filtering for personalized Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems are information systems that attempt to recommend items of interest to particular users based on their explicit and implicit preferences. Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) aims at assisting the decision maker in the decision making process, or giving the decision maker a recommendation, concerning a set of actions, alternatives, items etc. Thus, despite their differences, Recommender Systems and Multi-Criteria Decision Making share the same objective which is supporting the decision making process and reducing information overload. In this paper we propose a novel hybrid Multi-Criteria Trust-enhanced CF (MC-TeCF) approach. The proposed MC-TeCF approach combines the MC user-based CF and the MC user-based Trust filtering approaches to alleviate the standard Single-Criteria user-based CF limitations. Empirical results demonstrate the significance and effectiveness of the proposed MC-TeCF approach in terms of improving accuracy, as well as in dealing with very sparse data sets or cold start users compared with the standard Single-Criteria user-based CF approach.