A collaborative filtering recommender system using genetic algorithm

This paper presents a novel genetic-based recommender system (BLIGA) that depends on the semantic information and historical rating data. The main contribution of this research lies in evaluating the possible recommendation lists instead of evaluating items then forming the recommendation list. BLIGA utilizes the genetic algorithm to find the best list of items to the active user. Thus, each individual represents a candidate recommendation list. BLIGA hierarchically evaluates the individuals using three fitness functions. The first function uses semantic information about items to estimates the strength of the semantic similarity between items. The second function estimates the similarity in satisfaction level between users. The third function depends on the predicted ratings to select the best recommendation list. BLIGA results have been compared against recommendation results from alternative collaborative filtering methods. The results demonstrate the superiority of BLIGA and its capability to achieve more accurate predictions than the alternative methods regardless of the number of K-neighbors.