Healthy food recommendation using a time-aware community detection approach and reliability measurement

Abstract

Food recommendation systems have been increasingly developed in online food services to make recommendations to users according to their previous diets. Although unhealthy diets may cause challenging diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and premature heart diseases, most of the developed food recommendation systems neglect considering health factors in their recommendation process. This emphasizes the importance of the reliability of the recommendation from the health content perspective. This paper proposes a new food recommendation system based on health-aware reliability measurement. In particular, we develop a time-aware community detection approach that groups users into disjoint sets and utilizes the identified communities as the nearest neighbors set in rating prediction. Then, a novel reliability measurement is introduced by considering both the health and accuracy criteria of predictions to evaluate the reliability of predicted ratings. Also, the unreliable predictions are recalculated by removing ineffective users from the nearest neighbors set. Finally, the recalculated predictions are utilized to generate a list of foods as recommendations. Different experiments on a crawled dataset demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the performance around 7.63%, 6.97%, 7.37%, 15.09%, and 16.17% based on precision, recall, F1, normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG), and health metrics, respectively, compared to the second-best model.