A Clustering-Classification Recommender System based on Firefly Algorithm

In the last decade, online shopping has played a vital role in customers' approach to purchasing different products, providing convenience to shop and many benefits for the economy. E-commerce is widely used for digital media products such as movies, images, and software. So, recommendation systems are of great importance, especially in today's hectic world, which search for content that would be interesting to an individual. In this research, a new two-steps recommender system is proposed based on demographic data and user ratings on the public MovieLens datasets. In the first step, clustering on the training dataset is performed based on demographic data, grouping customers in homogeneous clusters. The clustering includes a hybrid Firefly Algorithm (FA) and K-means approach. Due to the FA's ability to avoid trapping into local optima, which resolves K-means' main pitfall, the combination of these two techniques leads to much better performance. In the next step, for each cluster, two recommender systems are proposed based on K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Naïve Bayesian Classification. The results are evaluated based on many internal and external measures like the Davies-Bouldin index, precision, accuracy, recall, and F-measure. The results showed the effectiveness of the K-means/FA/KNN compared with other extant models.