Assessment Methods for Evaluation of Recommender Systems: A Survey

Abstract The recommender system (RS) filters out important information from a large pool of dynamically generated information to set some important decisions in terms of some recommendations according to the user’s past behavior, preferences, and interests. A recommender system is the subclass of information filtering systems that can anticipate the needs of the user before the needs are recognized by the user in the near future. But an evaluation of the recommender system is an important factor as it involves the trust of the user in the system. Various incompatible assessment methods are used for the evaluation of recommender systems, but the proper evaluation of a recommender system needs a particular objective set by the recommender system. This paper surveys and organizes the concepts and definitions of various metrics to assess recommender systems. Also, this survey tries to find out the relationship between the assessment methods and their categorization by type.