Promoting Diversity in Content Based Recommendation Using Feature Weighting and LSH

Beleveslis, Dimosthenis; Tjortjis, Christos

This work proposes an efficient Content-Based (CB) product recommendation methodology that promotes diversity. A heuristic CB approach incorporating feature weighting and Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is used, along with the TF-IDF method and functionality of tuning the importance of product features to adjust its logic to the needs of various e-commerce sites. The problem of efficiently producing recommendations, without compromising similarity, is addressed by approximating product similarities via the LSH technique. The methodology is evaluated on two sets with real e-commerce data. The evaluation of the proposed methodology shows that the produced recommendations can help customers to continue browsing a site by providing them with the necessary “next step”. Finally, it is demonstrated that the methodology incorporates recommendation diversity which can be adjusted by tuning the appropriate feature weights.