Enhanced content-based fashion recommendation system through deep ensemble classifier with transfer learning

Abstract With the rise of online shopping due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Recommender Systems have become increasingly important in providing personalized product recommendations. Recommender Systems face the challenge of efficiently extracting relevant items from vast data. Numerous methods using deep learning approaches have been developed to classify fashion images. However, those models are based on a single model that may or may not be reliable. We proposed a deep ensemble classifier that takes the probabilities obtained from five pre-trained models such as MobileNet, DenseNet, Xception, and the two varieties of VGG. The probabilities obtained from the five pre-trained models are then passed as inputs to a deep ensemble classifier for the prediction of the given item. Several similarity measures have been studied in this work and the cosine similarity metric is used to recommend the products for a classified product given by a deep ensemble classifier. The proposed method is trained and validated using benchmark datasets such as Fashion product images dataset and Shoe dataset, demonstrating superior accuracy compared to existing models. The results highlight the potential of leveraging transfer learning and deep ensemble techniques to enhance fashion recommendation systems. The proposed model achieves 96% accuracy compared to the existing models.