A Time-Aware Hybrid Approach for Intelligent Recommendation Systems for Individual and Group Users

Although personal and group recommendation systems have been quickly developed recently, challenges and limitations still exist. In particular, users constantly explore new items and change their preferences throughout time, which causes difficulties in building accurate user profiles and providing precise recommendation outcomes. In this context, this study addresses the time awareness of the user preferences and proposes a hybrid recommendation approach for both individual and group recommendations to better meet the user preference changes and thus improve the recommendation performance. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms several baseline algorithms in terms of precision, recall, novelty, and diversity, in both personal and group recommendations. Moreover, it is clear that the recommendation performance can be largely improved by capturing the user preference changes in the study. These findings are beneficial for increasing the understanding of the user dynamic preference changes in building more precise user profiles and expanding the knowledge of developing more effective and efficient recommendation systems.