An Effective e-Commerce Recommender System Based on Trust and Semantic Information

Electronic commerce has been growing gradually over the last decade as a new driver of the retail industry. In fact, the growth of e-Commerce has caused a significant rise in the number of choices of products and services offered on the Internet. This is where recommender systems come into play by providing meaningful recommendations to consumers based on their needs and interests effectively. However, recommender systems are still vulnerable to the scenarios of sparse rating data and cold start users and items. To develop an effective e-Commerce recommender system that addresses these limitations, we propose a Trust-Semantic enhanced Multi-Criteria CF (TSeMCCF) approach that exploits the trust relations and multi-criteria ratings of users, and the semantic relations of items within the CF framework to achieve effective results when sufficient rating data are not available. The experimental results have shown that the proposed approach outperforms other benchmark recommendation approaches with regard to recommendation accuracy and coverage.