NEWER: A system for NEuro-fuzzy WEb Recommendation

In the era of the Web, there is urgent need for developing systems able to personalize the online experience of Web users on the basis of their needs. Web recommendation is a promising technology that attempts to predict the interests of Web users, by providing them with information and/or services that they need without explicitly asking for them. In this paper we propose NEWER, a usage-based Web recommendation system that exploits the potential of Computational Intelligence techniques to dynamically suggest interesting pages to users according to their preferences. NEWER employs a neuro-fuzzy approach in order to determine categories of users sharing similar interests and to discover a recommendation model as a set of fuzzy rules expressing the associations between user categories and relevances of pages. The discovered model is used by a online recommendation module to determine the list of links judged relevant for users. The results obtained on both synthetic and real-world data show that NEWER is effective for recommendation, leading to a quality of the generated recommendations comparable and often significantly better than those of other approaches employed for the comparison. (c) 2010 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.