Abstract
Lack of personalization, rating sparsity, and cold start are commonly seen in e-Learning based recommender systems. The proposed work here suggests a personalized fused recommendation framework for e-Learning. The framework consists of a two-fold approach to generate recommendations. Firstly, it attempts to find the neighbourhood of similar learners based on certain learner characteristics by applying a user-based collaborative filtering approach. Secondly, it generates a matrix of ratings given by the learners. The outcome of the first stage is merged with the second stage to generate recommendations for the learner. Learner characteristics, namely knowledge level, learning style, and learner preference, have been considered to bring in the personalization factor on the recommendations. As the stochastic gradient approach predicts the learner-course rating matrix, it helps overcome the rating sparsity and cold-start issues. The fused model is compared with traditional stand-alone methods and shows performance improvement.