Three-way recommender systems based on random forests

•We propose a framework integrating three-way decision and random forests.•We introduce a new recommender action to consult the user for the choice.•We build a random forest to predict the probability that a user likes an item.•The three-way thresholds are optimal for both the training set and the testing set.

Recommender systems attempt to guide users in decisions related to choosing items based on inferences about their personal opinions. Most existing systems implicitly assume the underlying classification is binary, that is, a candidate item is either recommended or not. Here we propose an alternate framework that integrates three-way decision and random forests to build recommender systems. First, we consider both misclassification cost and teacher cost. The former is paid for wrong recommender behaviors, while the latter is paid to actively consult the user for his or her preferences. With these costs, a three-way decision model is built, and rational settings for positive and negative threshold values α* and β* are computed. We next construct a random forest to compute the probability P   that a user will like an item. Finally, α*,0.35em0exβ*, and P are used to determine the recommender’s behavior. The performance of the recommender is evaluated on the basis of an average cost. Experimental results on the well-known MovieLens data set show that the (α*, β*)-pair determined by three-way decision is optimal not only on the training set, but also on the testing set.