Int. J. of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, Vol. x, No.

x, xx 1

The Recommender System: A Survey

Bushra Alhijawi
Department of Computer Information Systems,
The Hashemite University,
Zarqa, Jordan
E-mail: bushra.hijawi@itc.hu.edu.jo

Yousef Kilani
Department of Computer Information Systems,
The Hashemite University,
Zarqa, Jordan
E-mail: ymkilani@hu.edu.jo

Abstract: Recommender system is a helpful tool for helping the user in cutting the time
needs to find personalized products, documents, friends, places and services. In addition,
the recommender system handles the century web problem: information overload. In the
same time, many environments or technologies (i.e. cloud, mobile, social network) become
popular today and facing the problem of large amount of information. Therefore, the
researchers recognize that the recommender system is a suitable solution to this problem
in those environments. This paper, reviews the recent research papers that were applied
the recommender system in mobile, social network, or cloud environment. We classify
these recommender systems into four groups (i.e. mobile recommender system, social
recommender system, cloud recommender system and traditional (PC) recommender
system) depending on technology or environment that the RS is applied in. This survey
presents some compression, advantages and challenges of these types of recommender
systems. Also, it will directly support researchers and professionals in their understanding
of those types of recommender systems.

Keywords: Recommender system; Collaborative filtering; Recommendation; Hybrid;

Mobile; Cloud; Social; cold-start; Content-based filtering; Demographic-based filtering.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Alhijawi, B. and Kilani, Y. (xxxx)
‘The Recommender System: A Survey’, International Journal of Advanced Intelligence
Paradigms (IJAIP), Vol. x, No. x, pp.xxx–xxx.

Biographical notes: Bushra Alhijawi is a M.Sc. student in Computer Information

Systems and Innovation at Prince Al-Hussein bin Abdullah II Faculty of Information
Technology at The Hashemite University, Jordan. She is pursuing research on the
web intelligence, recommnder system, genetic algorithm, e-commerce, e-business and e-
learning. She has a B.Sc. degree in Computer Information Systems from the Al-Albayt
University, Jordan, in 2015 and graduated with 1st class Honor.

Yousef Kilani received his PhD in the Computer Science from the University of
Kebangsaan Malaysia, in 2007, MSc in Computer Science from the University of
Science Malaysia, in 1997, and BE in Computer Science from the Yarmouk University,
Jordan in 1994. He is currently an associate professor at the department of computer
information systems at the Hashemite University, Zarqa, Jordan. His research interests
include artificial intelligence, web intelligence, machine learning and real time multimedia
communication over the internet.

1 Introduction Recommender system (RS) decreases the number of

Everyday, a million of digital items (i.e. documents,
products, music, books, etc...) are uploaded into world
wide web (WWW). This increases the overload of
information in the WWW and provides multiple choices
for the users. Which make searching and finding the
target (i.e. documents, products, music, books, etc...)
hard and time-consuming task for users. Utilizing the
digital items that the user will search on it to the
potential favorite group of items to that user. On other
words, the RS aim to help web users to find only close
information to their preferences rather than searching
through undifferentiated mass of information[1].
The RS is a filtering system that makes prediction of
rates or preferences that may the user give it to a digital
Copyright
c 2008 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Copyright

c 2009 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
 The Recommender System: A Survey
Table 9 Summarization of analyzed papers in CFRS
Author Based on Algorithm
Xiao [43] Item GA
Siddiquee et al. [44] Item, User Fuzzy
Jia et al. [45] User GA
Li et al. [46] User Ant colony optimization
Salehi [47] User GA
Choi and Suh [48] Item, User New similarity function
Birtolo and Ronca [49] User Fuzzy clustering
audio when they cannot be obtained from usage data
by using deep convolutional neural networks. Semantic
audio content-based music recommendation is proposed
by Bogdanov [52]. The proposed technique produces a
semantic representation of the user’s musical preferences.
The DFRS is a RS depends on the personal attributes
of the user (e.g. age, sex, country, etc) or on the
features of items. Depending on the quality of items the
recommendation is generated using the RS that proposed
by Tejeda-Lorente et al. [53]. The proposed system
built using fuzzy linguistic approach. The demographic
features of the user (i.e. gender, occupation and age)
are used by Safoury and Salah [54] in order to
avoid the common problem in RS: cold-start problem.
They replaced the using of rating history by the user
demographic data to generate the recommendation.
The hybrid RS is a result of combining different
filtering techniques. Son [55] developed a hybrid RS
that combined fuzzy similarity degrees between users
depending on demographic data with hard user-based
degrees calculated from the rating histories. Kardan
and Ebrahimi [56] combined the CF and content-based
filtering in order to build a hybrid RS suited for
the asynchronous discussion groups. Also, Kant and
Bharadwaj [57] built a hybrid RS by combining a fuzzy-
CF with content-based filtering. They aim to develop
effective content-based filtering using fuzzy similarity
measures, item representation scheme and incorporating
collaborative diverse predictions. Salehi et al. [58]
developed a hybrid RS for learning materials. Their RS
consists of attribute-based filtering and genetic-based RS
in order to improve the quality of recommendation in the
e-learning system. In addition, Verma et al. [59] added
a contribution in hybrid RS science by proposed a RS
capable of avoiding sparsity and cold start problem by
combining CF with fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm.
Yao et al. [60] built hybrid RS to generate web services
recommendation via combining CF and content-based
filtering algorithm. A Movie RS applied the K-means
clustering and GA is proposed by Wang et al. [61].
They used the principal component analysis as a data
reduction technique to select the feature, then the
clusters were generated from relatively low dimension
vector space. The GA is utilized to optimize the K-mean
clustering process.
9
Table 10 Summarization of analyzed papers in CFRS
Author Hybrid RS components
[55] Fuzzy CF Hard user-based degrees
Kardan and Ebrahimi [56] CF Content-based filtering
Kant and Bharadwaj [57] Fuzzy CF Content-based filtering
Salehi et al. [58] Attribute-based filtering Genetic-based RS
Verma et al. [59] CF Fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm
Yao et al. [60] CF Content-based filtering
Wang et al. [61] CF K-means clustering
8 Conclusion
Recommender system is a helpful tool for handling
the century problem: information overload. Any
environment facilitates the communication and
information transmission face this problem. Therefore,
the recommender system is applied in this environment
to help the users to reach their favorite items, documents
and services in faster and easier way. The most
popular environments in this century are: mobile, social
networking and cloud.
In this study, we investigate the recommender
system that applied in mobile, social networking,
cloud and the traditional environment (i.e. PC). Based
on that, we classify the recommender system into
new four groups: mobile recommender system, social
recommender system, cloud recommender system and
traditional (PC) recommender system. In order to
complete the survey, 48 recent research papers are
analyzed (33 published journal papers and 15 papers
presented at conferences).
The recommender system is applied in the mobile
environment to perform three main tasks: (A) Tourist
Guides, (B) Route Recommendation. (C) Information
Recommendation for mobile users. Collaborative,
content-based, context-aware and hybrid filtering
techniques are used in the mobile recommender system.
But, the context-aware filtering algorithm is the most
technique applied to build the mobile recommender
system. As the traditional recommender system, the
mobile recommender system facing the cold start
problem. To avoid this problem in this type of
recommender system, the active learning technique is
used. By using this technique, the system asks the new
user (i.e. when signs up) to rates some items selected by
the system.
The cloud computing is an interesting technology
today. It is a rich environment contains a large
number of services, applications and a large amount
of information. The recommender system used in the
cloud environment for many purposes. One purpose is
to handle the scalability problem of the collaborative
recommender system. Also, some recommender systems
need high computational power. Applying this type
of recommender systems in cloud environment avoid
this problem. Another purpose is helping the user
in the process of selecting the optimal cloud service
from a large number of services. In the same time,
there are many challenges in this area such as security
challenges, integrate the cloud recommender systems
within networks (e.g. cellular networks, ad hoc networks
10
and sensor networks) and integrate the demographic
characteristics of users.
The social networks attract a million of users
and facilitate their communication. Also, it is a rich
environment for commercial, marketing and learning
organizations. This creates a deep pool that contains
a large number of user and a large amount of
information. The recommender systems that using the
social information in order to improve the accuracy
of recommendations or applying the in recommender
system the Web 2.0 applications is called social
recommender systems. May the social recommender
system applied in both aspects.
Traditional (PC) recommender system refers to
the recommender system used in the PC version
of the website. This recommender system used in
e-government, e-commerce, e-business, e-shopping, e-
learning, e-library, e-tourism, e-resource services and e-
group activities. All the popular filtering approaches
(i.e. collaborative filtering, content-based filtering,
demographic filtering and hybrid technique) can be used
in the Traditional (PC) recommender system.
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