Recommender systems: Issues, challenges, and research opportunities

Abstract

A recommender system is an Information Retrieval technology that improves access and proactively recommends relevant items to users by considering the users’ explicitly mentioned preferences and objective behaviors. A recommender system is one of the major techniques that handle information overload problem of Information Retrieval by suggesting users with appropriate and relevant items. Today, several recommender systems have been developed for different domains however, these are not precise enough to fulfil the information needs of users. Therefore, it is necessary to build high quality recommender systems. In designing such recommenders, designers face several issues and challenges that need proper attention. This paper investigates and reports the current trends, issues, challenges, and research opportunities in developing high-quality recommender systems. If properly followed, these issues and challenges will introduce new research avenues and the goal towards fine-tuned and high-quality recommender systems can be achieved.