Improving Food Recipe Suggestions with Hierarchical Classification of Food Recipes

Abstract: Making personalized recommendations has become a central part in many platforms, and is continuing to grow with more access to massive amounts of data online. Giving recommendations based on the interests of the individual, rather than recommending items that are popular, increases the user experience and can potentially attract more customers when done right. In order to make personalized recommendations, many platforms resort to machine learning algorithms. In the context of food recipes, these machine learning algorithms tend to consist of hybrid methods between collaborative filtering, content-based methods and matrix factorization. Most content-based approaches are ingredient based and can be very fruitful. However, fetching every single ingredient for recipes and processing them can be computationally expensive. Therefore, this paper investigates if clustering recipes according to what cuisine they belong to and what the main protein is can also improve rating predictions compared to when only collaborative filtering and matrix factorization methods are employed. This suggested content-based approach has a structure of a hierarchical classification, where recipes are first clustered into what cuisine group they belong to, then the specific cuisine and finally what the main protein is. The results suggest that the content-based approach can improve the predictions slightly but not significantly, and can help reduce the sparsity of the rating matrix to some extent. However, it suffers from heavily sparse data with respect to how many rating predictions it can give.