A novel movies recommendation algorithm based on reinforcement learning with DDPG policy

Abstract

Purpose

English original movies played an important role in English learning and communication. In order to find the required movies for us from a large number of English original movies and reviews, this paper proposed an improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm for the recommendation of movies. In fact, although the conventional movies recommendation algorithms have solved the problem of information overload, they still have their limitations in the case of cold start-up and sparse data.

Design/methodology/approach

To solve the aforementioned problems of conventional movies recommendation algorithms, this paper proposed a recommendation algorithm based on the theory of deep reinforcement learning, which uses the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm to solve the cold starting and sparse data problems and uses Item2vec to transform discrete action space into a continuous one. Meanwhile, a reward function combining with cosine distance and Euclidean distance is proposed to ensure that the neural network does not converge to local optimum prematurely.

Findings

In order to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed algorithm, the state of the art and the proposed algorithm are compared in indexes of RMSE, recall rate and accuracy based on the MovieLens English original movie data set for the experiments. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm is superior to the conventional algorithm in various indicators.

Originality/value

Applying the proposed algorithm to recommend English original movies, DDPG policy produces better recommendation results and alleviates the impact of cold start and sparse data.

Citation

Zhou, Q. (2020), "A novel movies recommendation algorithm based on reinforcement learning with DDPG policy", International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 67-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJICC-09-2019-0103