Enhancing Session-Based Trip Recommendations Using Matrix Factorization: a Study on Algorithm Efficiency and Resource Utilization

Abstract

As the impact and usefulness of recommendation systems continue to grow, their importance becomes more and more pronounced. Therefore, it is crucial to design and implement recommendation systems that are both efficient and highly accurate to meet the increasing demands and expectations. This study focuses on a model awarded first place in a travel forecasting recommendation system competition. This study aims to enhance matrix factorization-based recommender systems by conducting a comprehensive analysis of various factors. This includes examining the effects of resource utilization and recurrent neural network (RNN) algorithms on session-based factorization, as well as evaluating the influence of embeddings and optimization techniques concerning their efficiency and accuracy. The gated recurrent unit (GRU) algorithm has produced more accurate results for reduced datasets than long short-term memory (LSTM). Some modifications have been made on the embedding layers, and the results have been observed. In addition, the model's optimizer is changed, and the performance of different optimizers is evaluated. While random reduction of the dataset has led to a decrease in the success rate, methodical reduction has significantly increased the success rate. The highest and most reliable success rate (0.6654) was achieved by applying the selection method, which reduced the dataset to 1 M records from 1.5 M records. Optimizers have shown a wide range of effects on hardware.