Trust-based Modelling of Multi-criteria Crowdsourced Data

As a recommendation technique based on historical user information, collaborative filtering typically predicts the classification of items using a single criterion for a given user. However, many application domains can benefit from the analysis of multiple criteria, e.g. tourists usually rate attractions (hotels, attractions, restaurants, etc.) using multiple criteria. In this paper, we argue that the personalised combination of multi-criteria data together with the creation and application of trust models should not only refine the tourist profile, but also improve the quality of the collaborative recommendations. The main contributions of this work are: (1) a novel profiling approach which takes advantage of the multi-criteria crowdsourced data and builds pairwise trust models and (2) the k-NN prediction of user ratings using trust-based neighbour selection. Significant experimental work has been performed using crowdsourced datasets from the Expedia and TripAdvisor platforms. © 2017, The Author(s).