Movie Recommendation System using Composite Ranking

In today's world, abundant digital content like e-books, movies, videos and articles are available for consumption. It is daunting to review everything accessible and decide what to watch next. Consequently, digital media providers want to capitalise on this confusion and tackle it to increase user engagement, eventually leading to higher revenues. Content providers often utilise recommendation systems as an efficacious approach for combating such information overload. This paper concentrates on developing a synthetic approach for recommending movies. Traditionally, movie recommendation systems use either collaborative filtering, which utilises user interaction with the media, or content-based filtering, which makes use of the movie's available metadata. Technological advancements have also introduced a hybrid technique that integrates both systems. However, our approach deals solely with content-based recommendations, further enhancing it with a ranking algorithm based on content similarity metrics. The three metrics contributing to the ranking are similarity in metadata, visual content, and user reviews of the movies. We use text vectorization followed by cosine similarity for metadata, feature extraction by a pre-trained VGG19 followed by K-means clustering for visual content, and a comparison of sentiments for user reviews. Such a system allows viewers to know movies that "feel" the same.