Automated Online Course Recommendation System Using Collaborative Filtering
Automated Online Course Recommendation System Using Collaborative Filtering
https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2021.33043
International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.429
Volume 9 Issue II Feb 2021- Available at www.ijraset.com
Abstract: In the digital world of online information huge amounts of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are available of
different category and domain. Multiple online courses are available on different platform finding appropriate course from this
massive available course is difficult for students. Recommender system plays vital role in finding appropriate courses to students.
Managing massive amount of information and identifying individual users’ choice and behavior has become tedious task
nowadays, so the aim of recommender system is to suggest relevant course to student based on user behavior and similarity with
another course. Several recommender system techniques are being implemented like content based, collaborative, Knowledge
based. This paper aims to build a hybrid approach using collaborative filtering with content base filtering. This system
recommendation is based on course description and ratings. Experiments were conducted on real datasets to get the overall
performance of proposed system.
Keywords: Recommendation system, Collaborative Filtering (CF), Content based Filtering (CBF), Knowledge based Filtering,
MOOCs.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the ever-growing large volume of online information, recommender systems are an efficient strategy to beat such information
overload. Recommender systems are the systems that are designed to recommend things to the user supported various factors.
Companies like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc. use recommender systems to help their users to recommend the correct product,
video or movies for them. Advances in technology has changed the way of education. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are
capable of providing several learners to access courses over the web. Recommender System (RS) is computerized system that
suggest/recommend item to user.
The number of MOOCs and the number of students registered in MOOCs are growing per annum. In 2018, more than 900
universities were offering MOOCs with 11,400 courses available, and around 101 million students had registered in them (Shah,
2018), providing learners with a good sort of choices. With such a high number of courses available, learners now face the matter of
choosing courses without being overwhelmed.
With the rise in e-commerce and online business, the number of users interested in online Web services has increased. Both MOOC
providers and online businesses advertise their courses and services while learners look for courses that match their interests and
needs. In these situations, recommender systems play a crucial role, and have attracted the attention of researchers. Recommender
systems are algorithms and techniques that, based on their preferences, suggest matching and related courses or services to the
learner, knowledge about which comes from learner profiles and systems-gathered histories. Recommender systems help MOOC
providers grow and learners find more appropriate and customized services based on their personalities and interests.
Recommender systems discover patterns in considerable datasets to find out preferences of different users and predict items that
correlate to their needs. Recommender systems is divided into two broad categories: collaborative filtering recommender systems
and content-based recommender systems. Collaborative filtering recommender systems perform recommendations on users who
have had similar taste in the past will make similar choices in the future. Content based recommender systems consider the profile
of users and items.
The online course recommendation systems suggest to the students the best courses in which they are interested. This paper presents
a recommendation methodology that recommends courses to students based on similarity between courses taken by the target
student and other students. It aims to provide an effective course recommendation using multiple techniques. The students will be
clustered into groups based on traditional data-mining (DM) techniques will to Collaborative filtering using knowledgebase.
Recommendation
Technique
Drawbacks:
a) Problem of New-user -Same as for collaborative filtering, user profiles are required as input.
b) Limited analysis of content -The recommender highly depends on the information available from the documents. Therefore, the
documents contain either some machine-readable text or they need to be classified by users manually. The popularity of two
documents, which has the same vectors, cannot be differentiated by such content-based systems.
c) Over specialization-The recommender recommends the items similar to the ones and the one which is already known, leading
to a portfolio effect.
Collaborative
Filtering
Technique
Recommending courses for large dataset is difficult as Association rules have high confidence and low coverage on the dataset
hence, one low coverage rule will affect the average coverage of the rules.
M. Mohamed [2] The definition of ranking is most common in the recommendation system. Therefore, in the case of a rating-based
recommendation system, this data sparsity issue would have this problem, since certain users will score the subset of the overall
database because most common products would have less ratings that will impact the accuracy of the recommendation system.
Scalability: The system needs more resources for processing information and forming suggestions for users with the increase in
users and objects. The majority of tools available are used to classify users with common interests and similar tastes and
descriptions. The combination of various types of available techniques and physical enhancement of structures solves this form of
problem. Some computations are also calculated offline to improve the speed of the recommendations online.
Over-specialization: Over-specialization is another problem in the recommendation system, especially in content-based filtering.
The primary goal of such systems is to suggest items that are strongly compatible with consumer preferences; however, this could
lead to indicating items that have already been visited by the user. For example, in the news recommendation system, which is based
on content-based filtering, a user can receive recommended news that she has already read and that the consumer does not like
different ones.
Fang Liu [11] Apriori algorithm is introduced in core function design. Designed scheme is applied in one agricultural major
category of China Open University system to find student course selection frequent pattern and strong association rules in Animal
husbandry and veterinary medicine major category.
User Based Collaborative Filtering (UBCF) approach builds similarity between users by M. Kommineni, P [1]. Recommendation of
books using similarity measures proved to be efficient using user based collaborative filtering. Similarity methods were done using
PCC, CPCC, Cosine, Jaccard where CPCC (constarined pearson correlation) similarity measure is the best measure for calculating
similarities among users.
D. Estrela [6] Proposed hybrid approach by combining Content based filtering and Collaborative filtering approach to recommend
online course for elearners. Hybrid approach faces cold start problem and precision of recommender was not accurate.
JIANG Ya-tong [12] A hybrid recommendation system combining the features of collaborative, content based for personalized
subject recommendation for students. Each subject score is compared with each student using collaborative filtering. Pearson
correlation and angle cosine are used to calculate similarity is proposed system.
Hai-hui Wang [8] Modern learning style MOOCs, massive open online course, provide online courses to unlimited users and open
access via the web. It becomes difficult for the students to decide which course to opt within limited time. Jaccard’s Similarity is
used to cluster data.
V. Manvitha[13]The goal of the proposed system was to solve the issue of cold starts. It is a recommendation system that advises
users to play music. The Taste Profile dataset obtained from the Million Song Dataset is the dataset used. 10M is the dataset scale.
Moreover, no person relies on online sites to buy songs, apparels, books, rented films, etc. Competition occurred between different
online sites that forced owners of the Websites that provide their users with personalized music recommendations. So, the
recommender systems came into existence. The issue with cold starting is that the recommenders do not recommend entirely new
users or products for those users or items for which adequate knowledge is not available. The combination of association rules and
clustering technique is an algorithm based on this music recommender.
Effective Recommender system method was also tried during the research, the most popular would be [14], from Amazon.com.
They use recommendation algorithms to personalize the online store for each customer. Rather than matching the user to similar
customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering matches each of the user’s purchased and rated items to similar items, then combines
those similar items into a recommendation list. item-to-item collaborative filtering
algorithm is scalable over very large customer and product catalogs, requires very less processing time to recommend product.
Tanay Kulkarni [3] In proposed system student learning process is being monitor based on available resources so that student’s area
of interest can been known to recommend. Huge amount of information available on the web so getting relevant information which
fulfills user’s searching criteria is a main concern. Therefore, to address this issue the primary step of model is to develop a keyword
focused web crawler which extracts relevant URLs that includes the keyword searched by the user and considers only such web
pages as significant for further processing, thus increasing the accuracy and search efficacy. The system will get URLs for user
activity analysis and other users will receive recommendations. The subject of focus in this paper is the use of techniques for content
fetching and effective user profiling, so that the system gives out accurate recommendations.
M Viswa Murali [5] Proposed system recommender model “UBCF (User Based Collaborative Filtering) model” generates the
recommendation from the closest user behavior using the whole matrix saved. Internally the model calculates the cosine similarity
among all consumers represented as vectors.
Kiratijuta Bhumichitr[9]Choosing university courses is complicated, so this method focuses on advising students to take elective
courses. Since many elective open courses are available, but students do not have time to explore, this system often allows students
to know the correct course to be chosen. It recommends a course based on enrollment data from students.This paper is used by most
well-known algorithms to discover comparable students who use Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Alternating Least Square
Correlation Coefficient to collaboratively filter (ALS). The experimental results show that with 86 percent accuracy, applying ALS
in this domain is superior to collaborative.Student enrollment information was not adequate to assess student conduct to support
better recommendation. Downside of this method.
3) Step 3: Clustering
Aiming to identify similarity in course description and course objective, in this step, course is clustered using the K-means
algorithm. K-means clustering is one of the simplest and popular unsupervised machines learning algorithms.
Clustering refers to the task of classifying a set of objects into a set of homogeneous groups such that the objects within the same
group (i.e., cluster) are most similar while having the greatest dissimilarity to objects in other groups. The K-means algorithm works
by randomly selecting points as the initial centroids of clusters.
A measure of distance (e.g., Euclidean distance) is then calculated for each one of the other points, and each one is assigned to the
cluster having the closest centroid. Subsequently, a new centroid is computed for each one of the clusters. This iterative process of
assigning points to clusters and updating the centroids continues until the sum of squared errors is minimized. Clusters chosen by
proposed system is K=8. Each cluster are label by top 5 words that helps to understand which cluster contain which courses
computed for each one of the clusters.
Moreover, PCA is conducted with three, four, and five components for the purpose of dimension reduction.
New features were added to recommender system according to categories in clusters. Different features have different magnitude to
scale for example rating of courses varies from 0 to 5 using scikit-learn library features where standardizes. Similarity measures
between different courses is done by cosine similarity. Cosine Similarity measures angle between two vectors in multidimension
space here two vector refers to addition features of courses. Proposed system recommends course of user’s previous course if any or
similar course based on current selected course id.
V. RESULTS
We performed experiments using courses dataset taken by Udemy. Top 10 courses records are shown Figure4. Around 900 courses
where there without reviews/ratings. The average time period of a course is 26 months. Machine learning course had highest number
of subscribers.Clustering algorithm based on the course descriptions showed good results. Multiple k-s number of clusters were tried
out in kMeans algorithm. For optimal number of clusters k=8 shown in figure5.MAEcalculates the average magnitude of the errors
without considering their path.
Figure6: MAE
VI. CONCLUSION
Course recommendation system help the students in course choosing process. Classical recommendation techniques like content-
based filtering, collaborative filtering, and knowledge-based filtering are used in different commercial websites. For recommending
course to students’ similarity is performed for course topics and keywords. Proposed system recommends course to students based
on users rating and course description. This online course recommender system focused on hybrid approach of collaborative and
content-based filtering to recommend courses to students. The similarity measures between the user and courses are precise by
making use of the cosine similarity technique. The user is suggested with the top-rated courses according to his interest.
In the future, we can use other information of user so that it would determine the behavior of the student using NLP for further
recommendation.
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