Devising a Profit-Aware Recommender System using Multi-Objective GA

Recommender Systems are part of our life nowadays. In almost every big business, recommender systems are suggesting items to users automatically. The only factor that traditional recommender systems take into account is accuracy. They try to estimate user-item ratings as accurate as possible to recommend the more preferable items to users. But from the supplier point of view, profit is the most desirable achievement. In this paper we have proposed a profit-aware recommender system based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm. Our proposed method consider two objectives at the same time: Profit and Accuracy. Profit is amount of profit that company will gain of selling items and accuracy measures how much recommendations are close to user preferences. the NSGA-II as the most successful MO-GA has been selected here and its Crossover and Mutation operations have been designed. Our method and traditional collaborative-filtering method have been implemented and tested on three different datasets: Movielens, Netflix and Yahoo. Results confirm that in both accuracy and net-profit our method prevail over CF method.