Machine learning (ML) and especially deep learning (DL) with neural networks have demonstrated an amazing success in all sorts of AI problems, from computer vision to game playing, from natural language processing to speech and image recognition. In many ways, the approach of ML toward solving a class of problems is fundamentally different than the one followed in classical engineering, or with ontologies. While the latter rely on detailed domain knowledge and almost exhaustive search by means of static inference rules, ML adopts the view of collecting large datasets and processes this massive information through a generic learning algorithm that builds up tentative solutions. Combining the capabilities of ontology-based recommendation and ML-based techniques in a hybrid system is thus a natural and promising method to enhance semantic knowledge with statistical models. This merge could alleviate the burden of creating large, narrowly focused ontologies for complicated domains, by using probabilistic or generative models to enhance the predictions without attempting to provide a semantic support for them. In this paper, we present a novel hybrid recommendation system that blends a single architecture of classical knowledge-driven recommendations arising from a tailored ontology with recommendations generated by a data-driven approach, specifically with classifiers and a neural collaborative filtering. We show that bringing together these knowledge-driven and data-driven worlds provides some measurable improvement, enabling the transfer of semantic information to ML and, in the opposite direction, statistical knowledge to the ontology. Moreover, the novel proposed system enables the extraction of the reasoning recommendation results after updating the standard ontology with the new products and user behaviors, thus capturing the dynamic behavior of the environment of our interest.
Keywords: deep learning; neural collaborative filtering; ontologies; recommendation systems; retail dataset.