Lifelong Learning Courses Recommendation System to Improve Professional Skills Using Ontology and Machine Learning

Featured Application This article describes a system for recommending lifelong learning courses for the improvement of professional skills by using an ontology that is automatically updated to model professional profiles and courses. Lifelong learning enables professionals to update their skills to face challenges in their changing work environments. In view of the wide range of courses on offer, it is important for professionals to have recommendation systems that can link them to suitable courses. Based on this premise and on our previous research, this paper proposes the use of ontology to model job sectors and areas of knowledge, and to represent professional skills that can be automatically updated using the profiled data and machine learning for clustering entities. A three-stage hybrid system is proposed for the recommendation process: semantic filtering, content filtering and heuristics. The proposed system was evaluated with a set of more than 100 user profiles that were used in a previous version of the proposed recommendation system, which allowed the two systems to be compared. The proposed recommender showed 15% improvement when using ontology and clustering with DBSCAN in recall and serendipity metrics, and a six-point increase in harmonic mean over the stored data-based recommender system.