A Hybrid Temporal Recommender System Based on Sliding-Window Weighted Popularity and Elite Evolutionary Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization

This paper proposes a hybrid non-personalized temporal recommendation framework integrating Sliding-Window Weighted Popularity (SWWP) with Elite Evolutionary Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization (EEDPSO) to address the challenges of extreme data sparsity and temporal dynamics in global popularity-based recommendation. We first formally prove the NP hardness of the temporal-constrained recommendation problem, justifying the adoption of a metaheuristic approach. The proposed SWWP model employs a dual-scale sliding-window mechanism to balance short-term trend adaptation with long-term periodicity capture. A novel deep integration mechanism couples SWWP with EEDPSO through a “purchase heat” indicator, which guides temporal-aware particle initialization, position updates, and fitness evaluation. Extensive experiments on the Amazon Reviews dataset with extreme sparsity (density < 0.0005%) demonstrate that SWWP achieves an NDCG@20 of 0.245, outperforming nine temporal baselines by at least 13%. Furthermore, under a unified fitness function incorporating temporal prediction accuracy, the SWWP-EEDPSO framework achieves 5.95% higher fitness compared to vanilla EEDPSO, while significantly outperforming Differential Evolution and Genetic Algorithms. The temporally informed search strategy enables SWWP-EEDPSO to discover recommendations that better align with future user behavior, while maintaining sub-millisecond online query latency (0.52 ms) through offline precomputation and caching, demonstrating practical feasibility for deployment scenarios where periodic offline updates are acceptable.