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Horse-based tourism stands at the intersection of cultural heritage, leisure activities, and eco-friendly travel, captivating enthusiasts and researchers alike with its diverse facets and impacts. This study examines the horse-based tourism literature to provide an overview of horse-based tourism publications.

Using a systematic literature review (SLR) method, pertinent journal articles published over the past 3 decades were retrieved and analyzed. Based on the review process, 44 papers were identified and analyzed by publication year, journal distribution, research method, and lead author. Using Leximancer software, a thematic analysis was undertaken to determine the major themes of horse-based tourism.

The findings revealed a rising trend of horse-based tourism articles and the appearance of an increasing number of studies in tourism-oriented journals. In addition, it was discovered that the majority of available studies are qualitative, whereas quantitative research is few and limited.

Our research establishes a foundational resource for future studies and scholarly discourse on the multifaceted contributions of horse-based tourism.

This study can assist decision-makers in understanding the potential of horse-based tourism in the sustainable development of destinations. Moreover, it provides clear direction on implementing appropriate strategies to manage horse-based tourism.

This study distinguishes itself as the inaugural comprehensive literature review encompassing the breadth of horse-based tourism publications and research domains. By pioneering this endeavor, we not only contribute a unique perspective to the existing body of knowledge in the field but also emphasize the vital role of horse-based tourism in fostering economic and social sustainability for the countries involved.

Improving the performance of recommender systems (RSs) has always been a major challenge in the area of e-commerce because the systems face issues such as cold start, sparsity, scalability and interest drift that affect their performance. Despite the efforts made to solve these problems, there is still no RS that can solve or reduce all the problems simultaneously. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to provide an effective and comprehensive RS to solve or reduce all of the above issues, which uses a combination of basic customer information as well as big data techniques.

The most important steps in the proposed RS are: (1) collecting demographic and behavioral data of customers from an e-clothing store; (2) assessing customer personality traits; (3) creating a new user-item matrix based on customer/user interest; (4) calculating the similarity between customers with efficient k-nearest neighbor (EKNN) algorithm based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) approach and (5) defining a new similarity function based on a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior that are the key incentives for customers' purchases.

The proposed method was compared with different baselines (matrix factorization and ensemble). The results showed that the proposed method in terms of all evaluation measures led to a significant improvement in traditional collaborative filtering (CF) performance, and with a significant difference (more than 40%), performed better than all baselines. According to the results, we find that our proposed method, which uses a combination of personality information and demographics, as well as tracking the recent interests and needs of the customer with the LSH approach, helps to improve the effectiveness of the recommendations more than the baselines. This is due to the fact that this method, which uses the above information in conjunction with the LSH technique, is more effective and more accurate in solving problems of cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift.

The research data were limited to only one e-clothing store.

In order to achieve an accurate and real-time RS in e-commerce, it is essential to use a combination of customer information with efficient techniques. In this regard, according to the results of the research, the use of personality traits and demographic characteristics lead to a more accurate knowledge of customers' interests and thus better identification of similar customers. Therefore, this information should be considered as a solution to reduce the problems of cold start and sparsity. Also, a better judgment can be made about customers' interests by considering their recent purchases; therefore, in order to solve the problems of interest drifts, different weights should be assigned to purchases and launch time of products/items at different times (the more recent, the more weight). Finally, the LSH technique is used to increase the RS scalability in e-commerce. In total, a combination of personality traits, demographics and customer purchasing behavior over time with the LSH technique should be used to achieve an ideal RS. Using the RS proposed in this research, it is possible to create a comfortable and enjoyable shopping experience for customers by providing real-time recommendations that match customers' preferences and can result in an increase in the profitability of e-shops.

In this study, by considering a combination of personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior of customers along with the LSH technique, we were able for the first time to simultaneously solve the basic problems of CF, namely cold start, scalability, sparsity and interest drift, which led to a decrease in significant errors of recommendations and an increase in the accuracy of CF. The average errors of the recommendations provided to users based on the proposed model is only about 13%, and the accuracy and compliance of these recommendations with the interests of customers is about 92%. In addition, a 40% difference between the accuracy of the proposed method and the traditional CF method has been observed. This level of accuracy in RSs is very significant and special, which is certainly welcomed by e-business owners. This is also a new scientific finding that is very useful for programmers, users and researchers. In general, the main contributions of this research are: 1) proposing an accurate RS using personality traits, demographic characteristics and time-based purchasing behavior; 2) proposing an effective and comprehensive RS for a “clothing” online store; 3) improving the RS performance by solving the cold start issue using personality traits and demographic characteristics; 4) improving the scalability issue in RS through efficient k-nearest neighbors; 5) Mitigating the sparsity issue by using personality traits and demographic characteristics and also by densifying the user-item matrix and 6) improving the RS accuracy by solving the interest drift issue through developing a time-based user-item matrix.