A Cold Start Context-Aware Recommender System for Tour Planning Using Artificial Neural Network and Case Based Reasoning

Nowadays, large amounts of tourism information and services are available over the Web. This makes it difficult for the user to search for some specific information such as selecting a tour in a given city as an ordered set of points of interest. Moreover, the user rarely knows all his needs upfront and his preferences may change during a recommendation process. The user may also have a limited number of initial ratings and most often the recommender system is likely to face the well-known cold start problem. The objective of the research presented in this paper is to introduce a hybrid interactive context-aware tourism recommender system that takes into account user's feedbacks and additional contextual information. It offers personalized tours to the user based on his preferences thanks to the combination of a case based reasoning framework and an artificial neural network. The proposedmethod has been tried in the city of Tehran in Iran. The results show that the proposed method outperforms current artificial neural network methods and combinations of case based reasoning with k-nearest neighbor methods in terms of user effort, accuracy, and user satisfaction.