Research Article

Movie Recommender System using

Genetic Algorithm
Jyoti Joshi1

Abstract
Recommender systems have become extremely common in recent years, and are utilized in a variety
of areas: some popular applications include movies, music, news, books, research articles, search
queries, social tags, and products in general. Traditional recommendation techniques in
recommender systems mainly use content based or collaborative filtering techniques. These systems
only use the product ratings given by the users to predict/recommend new products or items to the
user. They do not consider other attributes while generating recommendations for a user.

This article describes a new recommendation system that uses genetic algorithm to learn about the
preferences of the users and provides recommendations based on these preferences. This research
uses Movie Lens (http://www.movielens.umn.edu) database and the genetic algorithm combines
features (22) from different files present in the dataset. These features are then used to train the
system. The 22 features are - movie rating, age, sex, occupation and 18 movie genres like action,
adventure, animation, children, comedy, crime, documentary, drama, fantasy, film-noir, horror,
musical, mystery, romance, sci-fi, thriller, war and western.

Keywords: Content based filtering, Collaborative filtering, Genetic algorithms, Recommender

system

Introduction
In everyday life it is often necessary to make a decision without resorting to personal experience of various
alternatives. When there are many alternatives it is difficult for users to make appropriate decisions. So people rely on
recommendations from other people’s knowledge or advertisements and reviews about the products either offline or
online.

Recommender systems are thus useful especially in this current age of internet where people are buying all sorts of
products like the daily essential needs like groceries, online. Many largest e-commerce and social media companies
are using recommender systems to assist their customers in searching items they would like to purchase. These
systems provide with the search results tailored to user’s own preference.1

Recommender systems generally use either content based or collaborative or hybrid techniques for
recommendations. In this article, a new recommendation system is proposed that uses an elitist genetic algorithm
together with some features of collaborative filtering and trains it on 22 movie features to generate
recommendations.

1
Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technical University, lucknow.
E-mail Id: jyotijoshi1222@gmail.com

Orcid Id: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8269-4082

How to cite this article: Joshi J. Movie Recommender System using Genetic Algorithm. J Adv Res Appl Arti Intel Neural Netw 2017;
4(1&2): 28-35.

© ADR Journals 2017. All Rights Reserved.

J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
This article is organized as follows. Section II reviews
related work and describes the structure of the
proposed recommender system. Section III explains the
genetic algorithm used. Section IV has the experimental
results and analysis and finally in Section V this article is
concluded.
Related Work
Recommender Systems
The main issue of a recommender system is how to
recommend items tailored with user’s preference from
resources. The recommender system also must
recognize and provide items corresponding with
favorites of users. To resolve this matter there are 2
main approaches: collaborative filtering and content-
based filtering.2
In the collaborative filtering approach, the
recommender system provides recommendations by
collecting users’ profiles and discovers relations
between each profile. After identifying correlation of
each profile, the system classifies users having profiles
that are similar to the others. The system then
recommends items derived from other profiles in the
same group. The advantage of this system is that it has
high probability to recommend items corresponding to
user’s preference by providing environments in which
user can share his or her own profile.3,4
4 35 0 20
Figure 1.Profile (j, i) – Profile for User j with Rating on Movie Item i, if i has a Rating of 4
Once profiles are built, the process of recommendation
can begin. Given an active user A, a set of neighborhood
profiles similar to profile (A) must be found.
From the Movie Lens database the ml100k data is used.
From this data u.item, u.data and u.user files are used to
create the user profiles. The u.item file contains movie
Id, movie name together with 18 bits corresponding to
movie genres. The movie Id and genres are used from
this file. Each entry in u.data file has user Id, movie Id
and corresponding rating. So for each user multiple
entries for movie Id, rating pair are created.
The data collected from other 2 files is combined with
u.user file to create profile (j, i). File u.user contains user
Id, age, gender and occupation fields for each user. For
each user Id and movie Id pair an entry for
corresponding rating, age, gender, occupation, and
genres is created.
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Joshi J
In the alternative approach, the content-based filtering,
the recommender system examines the description of
the items which are rated higher than others from
users. After this step, the system analyzes the similarity
between examined items and all of the remaining items.
The system then makes recommendation of new items
by ordering based on its high similarities with the
selected items.3,4 However, this approach has limitation
that it focuses on only accessed items.
We combine the collaborative filtering with an elitist
genetic algorithm and use not only the ratings of each
movie but other features like age, gender and movie
genres as well to train the system and generate
recommendations for the user.
Generating Profiles
Before recommendations can be made, the movie data
is processed into separate profiles, one for each person,
defining that person’s movie preferences. Profile (j, i) is
defined to mean the profile for user j on movie item i,
see fig. 1. The profile of j, profile (j) is therefore a
collection of profile (j, i) for all the movies i that j has
seen.
Rating, Age, Gender, Occupation ……… 22.18 Genre
frequencies
000000100010001100
Selecting Neighboring Profiles
The success of a collaborative filtering system is highly
dependent upon finding neighborhood of profiles that
are most similar to that of the active user. So only the
best or closest profiles should be chosen and used to
generate new recommendations for the user.
In an ideal world the entire database of profiles would
be used to select the best possible profiles. But this is
not a feasible option when the dataset is very large.
Thus, most system opt for random sampling and this is
what is done in this algorithm.
Once a set of profiles are selected the distance or
similarity between selected profiles and current user’s
profile must be computed. Most current recommender
system use standard algorithms that consider only the
movie ratings on which the comparison between 2
profiles is made. In real life however, two people are
Joshi J
said to be similar not only on the basis of having
different opinions on a particular subject but also on
other factors like their background, preferences etc.
We can apply the same thing here and consider
demographic information like user’s age, gender and
preferences of movie genres. Each user places a
different importance or priority on each feature. The
current approach shows how weights defining user’s
priorities can be evolved by a genetic algorithm.
The comparison between two profiles can now be
conducted using a modified Euclidean distance function
that takes into account multiple features. Euclidean (A,
B) is the similarity between active user A and user B:
Where: A is the active user; B is a user provided by
profile selection process, B ≠ A; n is the number of
common movies that users A and B have rated; j is one
of the 22 features; is the active user’s weight from
feature j; i is the common movie item, where profile(A,
i) and profile (B, i) exists (A, B) is the difference in
Figure 2.Calculating the similarity between A and B
J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
profile value for feature j between users A and B on
movie item i.
Before this calculation is made, the profile values are
normalized to ensure that they lie between 0 and 1.
When the weight for any feature is zero, that feature is
ignored. This way feature selection is made adaptive to
each user’s preferences. The difference in the profile
values for occupation is either 0, if the 2 users have the
same occupation or 1 otherwise.
Making Recommendations
Once the Euclidean distances, Euclidean (A, B), have
been found between profile (A) and profile (B), profile
(C), profile (D)… the best profiles are found. Each profile
is ranked according to its similarity to profile (A). The
system then simply selects the users whose Euclidean
distance is above a threshold value as the neighborhood
of A. This threshold is a system constant that can be
changed. For generating results presented in this article
this constant was kept at 0.2. To make a
recommendation for user A, it is necessary to find movie
items seen and liked by the users in the neighborhood
set that the active user has not seen. These
recommendations are then presented to the active user
through a user interface.
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J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
Proposed Genetic Algorithm
Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are stochastic search methods
inspired from the mechanism of natural evolution and
genetic inheritance. GAs work on a population of
candidate solutions; each solution has a fitness value
indicating its closeness to the optimal solution of the
problem. The solutions having higher fitness values than
others are selected and also survive to the next
generation. GAs then produce better offspring i.e. new
solutions by the combination of selected solutions. The
methods can discover, preserve, and propagate
promising sub-solutions.5,6
Some Basic Terminology of GAs:
• Population − It is a subset of all the possible
(encoded) solutions to the given problem. The
population for a GA is analogous to the population
for human beings except that instead of human
beings, we have Candidate Solutions representing
human beings.
• Chromosomes − A chromosome is one such
solution to the given problem.
• Gene − A gene is one element position of a
chromosome.
• Allele − It is the value a gene takes for a
chromosome.
• Genotype − Genotype is the population in the
computation space. In the computation space, the
solutions are represented in a way which can be
easily understood and manipulated using a
computing system.
• Phenotype − Phenotype is the population in the
actual real world solution space in which solutions
are represented in a way they are represented in
real world situations.
An elitist genetic algorithm was chosen for this task,
where a quarter of the best individuals in the population
are kept for the next generation. When creating a new
generation individuals are selected randomly out of the
top 40% of the whole population to be parents. Two
offspring’s are produced from each pair of parents,
using single-point crossover with probability 1.0.
Mutation is applied to each locus in genotype with
probability of 0.01. A simple unsigned binary genetic
encoding is used in the implementation, using 8 bits for
each of the 22 genes. The GA begins with random
genotypes.
A genotype is mapped to a phenotype (set of feature
weights) by converting the alleles of the binary genes to
decimal. The feature weights can then be calculated
from these real values. First a given factor reduces the
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Joshi J
importance of 18 movie genres. This is done because 18
genres are sub actually sub categories of a larger feature
– genre. Reducing the effect of these weights is
therefore intended to give the other unrelated features
(movie rating, age, gender and occupation) a more
equal change of being used. Second, the total value of
phenotype is then calculated by summing the real
values for all 22 features. Finally, the weighting value for
each feature can be found by dividing the real value by
the total value. The sum of all the weights will then add
up to unity.
Fitness Function
Generating good recommendations is dependent on
finding good set of weights for the 22 features. A poor
set of weights would result in a poor neighborhood set
of profiles for the active user and hence poor
recommendations. A good set of weights would result in
a good neighboring set and so good recommendations.
It was decided to reformulate the problem as a
supervised learning task. It is possible to predict what
active user A might think of movies. For example, if a
certain movie is suggested because similar users saw it
but only rated the movie as ‘average’ then it is likely
that the active user might also think that the movies was
‘average’. Hence for Movie Lens database it is possible
to both recommend new movies and predict how the
user would rate each movie if he sees it.
The predicted vote computation is taken from and
modified such that the Euclidean distance function
replaces the weight in the original equation.7 The
predicted vote, predict vote (A, i) for user A on item i,
can be defined as:
predict_vote(A,i)=meanA+kΣnj=1 euclidean(A,j)(vote (j,i)-
meanj)
Where: meanJ is the mean vote for user j; k is the
normalizing factor such that the sum of the Euclidean
distances is equal to 1 vote (j, i) is actual vote of user j
for item I; n is the size of the neighborhood. All the
movie items that the active user has seen are randomly
partitioned into two datasets: a training set (1/3) and a
test set (2/3). To calculate a fitness measure for an
evolved set of weights, the recommender system finds a
set of neighborhood profiles for the active user as
described section II. The ratings of the users in the
neighborhood set are then used to compute the
predicted rating for the active user on each movie item
in the training set. Because the active user has already
rated movies, it is possible to compare the actual rating
with the predicted rating. So the fitness score is
Joshi J J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)

computed as the average of differences between actual This score is used to guide the future generations of
and predicted ratings of all movies in the training set. weight evolution, see Fig. 3.
Profile Selection and Matching

Figure 3.Finding the Fitness Score of an Individual (The Active User’s Feature Weights)

Experiments and Result Analysis
Experiments
Four sets of experiments were designed to observe the
difference in performance between the evolutionary
recommender system and a standard, non-adaptive
recommender system based on the Pearson algorithm.7
In each set of experiments, the predicted votes of all the
movie items in the test set (the items that the active
user has rated but were not used in weights evolution)
were computed using the final feature weights for that
run. These votes were then compared against those
produced from the simple Pearson algorithm.

Figure 4.Result for Experiment 1

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J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2) Joshi J

Figure 5.Result for Experiment 2

Figure 6.Result for Experiment 3

Figure 7.Result for Experiment 4

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Joshi J
Experiment 1: Each of the first 10 users was picked as
the active user in turn, and the first 10 users (fixed)
were used to provide recommendations.
Experiment 2: Each of the first 10 users was picked as
the active user in turn, and 10 users were picked
randomly and used to provide recommendations.
Experiment 3: Each of the first 50 users was picked as
the active user in turn, and the first 50 users (fixed)
were used to provide recommendations.
Experiment 4: Each of the first 50 users was picked as
the active user in turn, and 50 users were picked
randomly and used to provide recommendations.
Each graph above shows the percentage of the number
of ratings that the system predicted correctly out of the
total number of available ratings by the current active
user. Whilst the predictions computed with the Pearson
algorithm always remain the same given the same
parameter values, those obtained from the GA vary per
the feature weights of that run. Out of the 10 runs for
each active user in each experiment, the run with the
best feature weights (that gave the highest percentage
of right predictions) was chosen and plotted against the
result from the Pearson algorithm.
In the first experiment, the GA recommender performed
equally well (or better) compared to the Pearson
algorithm on 7 active users out of 10. In the third
experiment, out of the 50 users the accuracy for the GA
recommender fell below that of the Pearson algorithm
for 17 active users. On the rest of the active users, the
accuracy for the GA recommender was found to be
better – in some cases (user 16) the difference was as
great as 32%. The random sampling for experiment 2
showed great improvement on the prediction accuracy
Figure 8.Feature Weights for Active User 4
J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
for the GA recommender. All 10 active users performed
better than the Pearson algorithm.
The results for the last experiment show that the
accuracy for the GA recommender was significantly
better for all but 15 active users.
Analysis of Results
Experiment 1 indicates that the prediction accuracy for
the active user 6, 8 and 9 on the GA recommender was
worse than that obtained from using the Pearson
algorithm. But when the number of users was increased
to 50 in experiment 3, the accuracy for the three
mentioned active users rose and outperformed the
other algorithm. This was expected – as the number of
users goes up, the probability of finding a better
matched profile should be higher and hence accuracy of
the predictions should also increase.
The results suggest that random sampling is a good
choice for the profile selection task of retrieving profiles
from the database. Random sampling was expected to
be better than fixing which users to select because it
allowed the search to consider a greater variety of
profiles (potentially 10*10 runs = 100 users in
experiment 2 and 50 * 10 = 500 users in experiment 4)
and hence find a better set of well matched profiles.
As mentioned earlier, only the run(s) with the best
feature weights for each active user were considered for
this analysis.
Looking at the final feature weights obtained for each
active user, many interesting observations have been
found.
Let’s focus on a couple of active users - 4 and 27.
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J. Adv. Res. Appl. Arti. Intel. Neural Netw. 2017; 4(1&2)
The weights for feature 5-22 would be lower because of
the scaling factor applied.
Active user 4 is 24 year old male who is a technician by
occupation. This user gives maximum preference to 2nd
feature which is age. So it is likely that in this user’s
neighborhood other users with similar age group would
Figure 9.Feature Weights for Active User 27
This user gives more weight age to age and gender. She
has interests in Western, sci-fi, romance, drama, crime
and children’s genres. She is a 40 year old female and so
might have small children and that is she has interests in
sci-fi and children’s genres. She is a woman and so
would like movies with romance and drama like most
other women her age and given her profession.
Conclusion
This work has shown how evolutionary search can be
employed to fine-tune a profile-matching algorithm
within a recommender system, tailoring it to the
preferences of individual users.
This was achieved by reformulating the problem of
making recommendations into a supervised learning
task, enabling fitness scores to be computed by
comparing predicted votes with actual votes.
Experiments demonstrated that, compared to a non-
adaptive approach, the evolutionary recommender
system was able to successfully fine-tune the profile
matching algorithm. This enabled the recommender
system to make more accurate predictions, and hence
better recommendations to users.
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Joshi J
be found. From the feature weights it can be seen that
he gives more preference to War, thriller and horror
movies which you would expect from a 24 year old boy.
Another active user 27 is analyzed who is a 40 year old
female and is a librarian by profession.
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