A Recommender system for rental properties

Abstract

Locating products or services online that meet users’ needs is increasingly difficult due to the large pool of choices to consider before arriving at the desired one. A user may spend a considerable amount of time exploring numerous online resources to locate items that fit his requirements. Furthermore, users may not always express their preferences in a manner that easily matches them to items that could meet them. Searching for items online has been done mainly through database queries that return a list of the most suitable items. Recommender systems technology can be applied to ease the task of locating desired items online. This study proposes a recommender system that enables users to carry out a preference-based search on rental properties and enables them to refine those preferences using example-critiquing in case they are not satisfied with initial search results. This recommendation approach has been shown to provide more accurate search results. This research adopted the Object-Oriented Systems Analysis and Design (OOAD) approach to the development of the system. The system was developed as a Web application using the Ruby on Rails framework. Furthermore, the system was tested to ascertain that it performed as designed.