A Trust-Based Recommender System for Personalized Restaurants Recommendation

Abstract

Several online restaurant applications, such as TripAdvisor and Yelp, provide potential consumers with reviews and ratings based on previous customers’ experiences. These reviews and ratings are considered the most important factors that determine the customer’s choice of restaurants. However, the selection of a restaurant among many unknown choices is still an arduous and time- consuming task, particularly for tourists and travellers. Recommender systems utilize the ratings provided by users to assist them in selecting the best option from many options based on their preferences. In this paper, we propose a trust-based recommendation model for helping consumers select suitable restaurants in accordance with their preferences. The proposed model utilizes multi- criteria ratings of restaurants and implicit trust relationships among consumers to produce personalized restaurant recommendations. The experimental results based on a real-world restaurant dataset demonstrated the superiority of the proposed model, in terms of prediction accuracy and coverage, in overcoming the sparsity and new user problems when compared to other baseline CF-based recommendation algorithms.