Restaurant Recommendation System using Machine Learning

Nowadays a big challenge when going out to a new restaurant or cafe, people usually use websites or applications to look up nearby places and then choose one based on an average rating. But most of the time the average rating isn't enough to predict the quality or hygiene of the restaurant. Different people have different perspectives and priorities when evaluating a restaurant. Many online businesses now have implemented personalized recommendation systems which basically try to identify user preferences and then provide relevant products to enhance the users experience . In turn, users will be able to enjoy exploring what they might like with convenience and ease because of the recommendation results. Finding an ideal restaurant can be a struggle because the mainstream recommender apps have not yet adopted the personalized recommender approach. So we took up this challenge and we aim to build the prototype of a personalized recommender system that incorporates metadata which is basically the information provided by interactions of customers and restaurants online(reviews), which gives a pretty good idea of customers satisfaction and taste as well as features of the restaurant. This type of approach enhances user experience of finding a restaurant that suits their taste better. This paper has used a package called lightfm(the library of python for implementing popular recommendation algorithms) and the dataset from yelp. There are different methods of filtering the data, here we have used Hybrid filtering which is a combination of Content-based filtering (CBF) and Collaborative Filtering (CF). Since the results from Hybrid filtering are far more closer to accuracy than CBF or CF respectively. Then hybrid filtering gives results in the form of personalized recommendations for users after training and testing of the data