A Novel Many-Objective Recommendation Algorithm for Multistakeholders

Most traditional recommender systems focus specifically on increasing consumer satisfaction by providing a list of relevant content to consumers. However, the perspectives of other multisided marketplace stakeholders are also equally important, i.e., the exposure for suppliers or providers and profit for the platform. The suppliers want their products to be presented to users, and the objective of the platform is to maximize their profit. Nevertheless, because consumers’ preferences and the objectives of providers as well as the platform may conflict with each other, it degrades the utility of the recommendation methods by only considering users’ views. Therefore, in this work, we use a many-objective optimization method to maintain a tradeoff among five objectives for three stakeholders and obtain multiple Pareto front solutions in a single run. We first combine customer lifetime value and user purchase preference to create a new similarity model (Sim_RFMP) to increase the recommendation accuracy of the recommendation list. Furthermore, we propose a many-objective model (NBHXMAOEA) for multistakeholder recommendation. In NBHXMAOEA, we present a novel N-block heuristic crossover operator (NBHX) that recombines blocks of chromosomes based on heuristics. Through extensive experiments, the results demonstrate that our proposed NBHXMAOEA achieves superior performance in terms of average accuracy, diversity, novelty, provider coverage, and platform profit to its competing methods.