Cluster-based denoising autoencoders for rate prediction recommender systems

Abstract

Recommender system (RS) is a suitable tool for filtering out items and providing the most relevant and suitable items to each user, based on their individual preferences. Deep learning algorithms achieve great success in several fields including RS. The issue with deep learning-based RS models is that, they ignore the differences of users’ preferences, and they build a model based on all the users’ rates. This paper proposed an optimized clustering-based denoising autoencoder model (OCB-DAE) which trains multiple models instead of one, based on users’ preferences using k-means algorithm combined with a nature-inspired algorithm (NIA) such as artificial fish swarm algorithm to determine the optimal initial centroids to cluster the users based on their similar preferences, and each cluster trains its own denoising autoencoder (DAE) model. The results proved that combining NIA with k-means gives better clustering results comparing with using k-means alone. OCB-DAE was trained and tested with MovieLens 1M dataset where 80% of it is used for training and 20% for testing. Root mean squared error (RMSE) score was used to evaluate the performance of the proposed model which was 0.618. It outperformed the other models that use autoencoder and denoising autoencoder without clustering with 38.5% and 29.5% respectively.