Enhancing Recommender System performance through the fusion of Fuzzy C-Means, Restricted Boltzmann Machine, and Extreme Learning Machine

The prevalence of Recommender Systems (RS) has surged due to the widespread growth of the Internet and its related technologies. The efficiency of the RS is dependent on the quality of the underlying datasets used for training. Sparse datasets present a challenge for training such systems and negatively impacts their efficiency. This research paper presents novel synergistic approaches that combine Fuzzy C-Means (FCM), Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM), and Extreme Learning Machines (ELM), to enhance Collaborative Filtering (CF) in RS. The study introduces two clustering-based approaches, FCM-ELM and FCM-RBM-ELM, to address the issue of non-optimal hidden biases and input weights in ELM caused by random assignment in order to overcome the data sparsity effect in RS. The efficiency of proposed approaches against different clustering methods has been evaluated using two benchmark datasets and four metrics. The empirical results indicate that the proposed methods can generate better recommendation results compared to other traditional techniques.