Enhancing Recommender Systems by Fusing Diverse Information Sources through Data Transformation and Feature Selection

Recommender systems aim to recommend items to users by taking into account their probable interests. This study focuses on creating a model that utilizes multiple sources of information about users and items by employing a multimodality approach. The study addresses the task of how to gather information from different sources (modalities) and transform them into a uniform format, resulting in a multi-modal feature description for users and items. This work also aims to transform and represent the features extracted from different modalities so that the information is in a compatible format for integration and contains important, useful information for the prediction model. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel multi-modal recommendation model, which involves extracting latent features of users and items from a utility matrix using matrix factorization techniques. Various transformation techniques are utilized to extract features from other sources of information such as user reviews, item descriptions, and item categories. We also proposed the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Feature Selection techniques to reduce the data dimension and extract important features as well as remove noisy features to increase the accuracy of the model. We conducted several different experimental models based on different subsets of modalities on the MovieLens and Amazon sub-category datasets. According to the experimental results, the proposed model significantly enhances the accuracy of recommendations when compared to SVD, which is acknowledged as one of the most effective models for recommender systems. Specifically, the proposed model reduces the RMSE by a range of 4.8% to 21.43% and increases the Precision by a range of 2.07% to 26.49% for the Amazon datasets. Similarly, for the MovieLens dataset, the proposed model reduces the RMSE by 45.61% and increases the Precision by 14.06%. Additionally, the experimental results on both datasets demonstrate that combining information from multiple modalities in the proposed model leads to superior outcomes compared to relying on a single type of information.