Applying Neural Network Model to Hybrid Tourist Attraction Recommendations

Abstract

Recently, recommender systems have been developed for a variety of domains. Recommender systems also can be applied in tourism industry to help tourists organizing their travel plans. Recommender systems can be developed by a variety of different techniques such as Content-Based filtering (CB), Collaborative filtering (CF), and Demographic filtering (DF). However, the uses of these techniques individually will have some disadvantages. In this research, we propose a hybrid recommender system to combine the predictions from CB, CF and DF approaches using neural network model. Neural network model will learn by processing a training dataset, comparing the network’s prediction for each dataset with the actual known target value. For each training dataset, the weights are modified to minimize the mean-squared error between the network’s prediction and the actual target value. The experimental results showed that the neural network model outperforms each individual recommendation techniques.

Index Terms - Colaborative Filtering, Content-based filtering, Data Mining, Demographic Filtering, Hybrid Recommender System, Neural Network