Improving Recommendation Systems Using Image Data

Abstract: Recommendation systems typically use historical interactions between users and items topredict what other items can be of interest to a user. The recommendations are based onpatterns in how users interact similarly with items. This thesis investigates if it is possible toimprove the quality of the recommendations by including more information about the items inthe model that predicts the recommendations. More specifically, the use of deep learning toextract information from item images is investigated. To do this, two types of collaborativefiltering models, based on historic interactions, are implemented. These models are thencompared to different collaborative filtering models that either make use of user and itemattributes, or images of the items. Three pre-trained image classification models are used toextract useful item features from the item images. The models are trained and evaluated using adataset of historic transactions and item images from the online sports shop Stadium, given bythe thesis supervisor. The results show no noticeable improvement in performance for themodels using the images compared to the models without images. The model using the userand item attributes performs the best, indicating that the collaborative filtering models can beimproved by giving it more information than just the historic interactions. Possible ways tofurther investigate using the image feature vectors in collaborative filtering models, as well asusing them to create better item attributes, are discussed and suggested for future work.