DOCSLIB.ORG

Mining Large Streams of User Data for Personalized Recommendations

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Mining Large Streams of User Data for Personalized Recommendations Mining Large Streams of User Data for Personalized Recommendations Xavier Amatriain Netflix xamatriain@netflix.com ABSTRACT solutions - think, for example, of ranking metrics such as Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) or other The Netflix Prize put the spotlight on the use of data min- information retrieval ones such as recall or area under the ing and machine learning methods for predicting user pref- curve (AUC). Beyond the optimization of a given offline met- erences. Many lessons came out of the competition. But ric, what we are really pursuing is the impact of a method on since then, Recommender Systems have evolved. This evo- the business. Is there a way to relate the goodness of an algo- lution has been driven by the greater availability of different rithm to more customer-facing metrics such as click-through kinds of user data in industry and the interest that the area rate (CTR) or retention? I will describe our approach to in- has drawn among the research community. The goal of this novation called \Consumer Data Science" in section 3.1. paper is to give an up-to-date overview of the use of data mining approaches for personalization and recommendation. But before we understand the reasons for all these effects, Using Netflix personalization as a motivating use case, I will and before we are ready to embrace the open research ques- describe the use of different kinds of data and machine learn- tions in the area of personalization described in Section 5, ing techniques. we need to understand some of the basic techniques that enable the different approaches. I will briefly describe them After introducing the traditional approaches to recommen- in the following paragraphs. dation, I highlight some of the main lessons learned from the Netflix Prize. I then describe the use of recommenda- tion and personalization techniques at Netflix. Finally, I 1.1 Approaches to the Recommendation pinpoint the most promising current research avenues and problem unsolved problems that deserve attention in this domain. The most common approach to build a Recommender Sys- tem is to use one of the many available Collaborative Fil- 1. INTRODUCTION tering (CF) algorithms [1]. The underlying assumption of Recommender Systems (RS) are a prime example of the these methods is captured by the principle of like minded- mainstream applicability of large scale data mining. Ap- ness: users who are measurably similar in their historical plications such as e-commerce, search, Internet music and preferences are likely to also share similar tastes in the fu- video, gaming or even online dating make use of similar ture. In other words, CF algorithms assume that, in order techniques to mine large volumes of data to better match to recommend content of any kind to users, information can their users' needs in a personalized fashion. be drawn from what they and other similar users have liked There is more to a good recommender system than the data in the past. Historically, the k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN) mining technique. Issues such as the user interaction design, algorithm was the most favored approach to CF, since it outside the scope of this paper, may have a deep impact transparently captured this assumption of like-mindedness: on the effectiveness of an approach. But given an existing it operates by finding, for each user (or item), a number application, an improvement in the algorithm can have a of similar users (items) whose profiles can then be used to value of millions of dollars, and can even be the factor that directly compute recommendations [55]. determines the success or failure of a business. On the other The main alternative to CF is the so-called content-based hand, given an existing method or algorithm, adding more approach [46], which identifies similarities between items features coming from different data sources can also result based on the features inherent in the items themselves. These in a significant improvement. I will describe the use of data, recommender systems require a way to extract content de- models, and other personalization techniques at Netflix in scriptions and a similarity measure between items. Auto- section 3. I will also discuss whether we should focus on matic content description is still only available for some more data or better models in section 4. kinds of content, and under some constraints. That is why Another important issue is how to measure the success of some systems need to rely on experts to manually input and a given personalization technique. Root mean squared er- categorize the content [56]. On the other hand, content- ror (RMSE) was the offline evaluation metric of choice in based approaches can deal with some of the shortcomings the Netflix Prize (see Section 2). But there are many other of CF such as item cold-start - i.e. the initialization of new relevant metrics that, if optimized, would lead to different items that the system has no previous user preference data for. CF and content-based methods can be combined in different ways using hybrid approaches [15]. Hybrid RS can combine SIGKDD Explorations Volume 14, Issue 2 Page 37 several different methods in a way that one method provides ensemble: Matrix Factorization (MF) [35] 1 and Restricted support whenever the other methods are lacking. In prac- Boltzmann Machines (RBM) [54]. Matrix Factorization by tice, most of the advanced recommendation systems used in itself provided a 0.8914 RMSE, while RBM alone provided a the industry are based on some sort of hybridation, and are competitive but slightly worse 0.8990 RMSE. A linear blend rarely purely CF or content-based. of these two reduced the error to 0.88. To put these algo- rithms to use, we had to work to overcome some limitations, 1.2 Data Mining methods in Recommender for instance that they were built to handle 100 million rat- Systems ings, instead of the more than 5 billion that we have, and that they were not built to adapt as members added more No matter which of the previous approaches is used, a rec- ratings. But once we overcame those challenges, we put the ommender system's engine can be seen as a particular in- two algorithms into production, where they are still used as stantiation of a traditional data mining task [4]. A data min- part of our recommendation engine. ing task typically consists of 3 steps, carried out in succes- The standard matrix factorization decomposition provides sion: Data Preprocessing, Data Modeling, and Result Anal- user factor vectors U 2 Rf and item-factors vector V 2 ysis. Traditional machine learning techniques such as di- u v Rf . In order to predict a rating, we first estimate a baseline mensionality reduction, classification, or clustering, can be b = µ+b +b as the user and item deviation from average. applied to the recommendation problem. In the following uv u v The prediction can then be obtained by adding the product paragraphs, I will describe some of the models that, beyond of user and item factors to the baseline as r0 = b +U T U . the classical kNN, can be used to build a recommender sys- uv uv u v tem. One of the most interesting findings during the Netflix Prize came out of a blog post. Simon Funk introduced an incre- Although current trends seem to indicate that other matrix mental, iterative, and approximate way to compute the SVD factorization techniques are preferred (see Section 2.1), ear- using gradient descent [22]. This provided a practical way lier works used Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to scale matrix factorization methods to large datasets. [24] . Decision Trees may be used in a content-based ap- proach for a RS. One possibility is to use content features to Another enhancement to matrix factorization methods was build a decision tree that models the variables involved in Koren et. al's SVD++ [33]. This asymmetric variation the user preferences [13]. Bayesian classifiers have been enables adding both implicit and explicit feedback, and re- used to derive a model for content-based RS [23]. Artifi- moves the need for parameterizing the users. cial Neural Networks (ANN) can be used in a similar The second model that proved successful in the Netflix Prize way as Bayesian Networks to construct content-based RS's was the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM). RBM's can [47]. ANN can also be used to combine (or hybridize) the be understood as the fourth generation of Artificial Neural input from several recommendation modules or data sources Networks - the first being the Perceptron popularized in the [20]. Support Vector Machines (SVM) have also shown 60s; the second being the backpropagation algorithm in the promising recent results [30]. 80s; and the third being Belief Networks (BNs) from the Clustering approaches such as k-means can be used as a 90s. RBMs are BNs that restrict the connectivity to make pre-processing step to help in neighborhood formation [65]. learning easier. RBMs can be stacked to form Deep Belief Finally, association rules [3] can also be used[38]. Nets (DBN). For the Netflix Prize, Salakhutditnov et al. proposed an RBM structure with binary hidden units and softmax visible units with 5 biases only for the movies the 2. THE NETFLIX PRIZE user rated [54]. Many other learnings came out of the Prize. For exam- In 2006, Netflix announced the Netflix Prize, a machine ple, the matrix factorization methods mentioned above were learning and data mining competition for movie rating pre- combined with the traditional neighborhood approaches [33]. diction. We offered $1 million to whoever improved the ac- Also, early in the prize, it became clear that it was impor- curacy of our existing system called Cinematch by 10%.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Netflix Prize Contest
    1) New Paths to New Machine Learning Science 2) How an Unruly Mob Almost Stole the Grand Prize at the Last Moment Jeff Howbert University of Washington February 4, 2014 Netflix Viewing Recommendations Recommender Systems DOMAIN: some field of activity where users buy, view, consume, or otherwise experience items PROCESS: 1. users provide ratings on items they have experienced 2. Take all < user, item, rating > data and build a predictive model 3. For a user who hasn’t experienced a particular item, use model to predict how well they will like it (i.e. predict rating) Roles of Recommender Systems y Help users deal with paradox of choice y Allow online sites to: y Increase likelihood of sales y Retain customers by providing positive search experience y Considered essential in operation of: y Online retailing, e.g. Amazon, Netflix, etc. y Social networking sites Amazon.com Product Recommendations Social Network Recommendations y Recommendations on essentially every category of interest known to mankind y Friends y Groups y Activities y Media (TV shows, movies, music, books) y News stories y Ad placements y All based on connections in underlying social network graph, and the expressed ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ of yourself and your connections Types of Recommender Systems Base predictions on either: y content‐based approach y explicit characteristics of users and items y collaborative filtering approach y implicit characteristics based on similarity of users’ preferences to those of other users The Netflix Prize Contest y GOAL: use training data to build a recommender system, which, when applied to qualifying data, improves error rate by 10% relative to Netflix’s existing system y PRIZE: first team to 10% wins $1,000,000 y Annual Progress Prizes of $50,000 also possible The Netflix Prize Contest y CONDITIONS: y Open to public y Compete as individual or group y Submit predictions no more than once a day y Prize winners must publish results and license code to Netflix (non‐exclusive) y SCHEDULE: y Started Oct.
    [Show full text]
  • Lessons Learned from the Netflix Contest Arthur Dunbar
    Lessons Learned from the Netflix Contest Arthur Dunbar Background ● From Wikipedia: – “The Netflix Prize was an open competition for the best collaborative filtering algorithm to predict user ratings for films, based on previous ratings without any other information about the users or films, i.e. without the users or the films being identified except by numbers assigned for the contest.” ● Two teams dead tied for first place on the test set: – BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos – The Ensemble ● Both are covered here, but technically BellKor won because they submitted their algorithm 20 minutes earlier. This even though The Ensemble did better on the training set (barely). ● Lesson one learned! Be 21 minutes faster! ;-D – Don't feel too bad, that's the reason they won the competition, but the actual test set data was slightly better for them: ● BellKor RMSE: 0.856704 ● The Ensemble RMSE: 0.856714 Background ● Netflix dataset was 100,480,507 date-stamped movie rating performed by anonymous Netflix customers between December 31st 1999 and December 31st 2005. (Netflix has been around since 1997) ● This was 480,189 users and 17,770 movies Background ● There was a hold-out set of 4.2 million ratings for a test set consisting of the last 9 movies rated by each user that had rated at lest 18 movies. – This was split in to 3 sets, Probe, Quiz and Test ● Probe was sent out with the training set and labeled ● Quiz set was used for feedback. The results on this were published along the way and they are what showed upon the leaderboard ● Test is what they actually had to do best on to win the competition.
    [Show full text]
  • Netflix and the Development of the Internet Television Network
    Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2016 Netflix and the Development of the Internet Television Network Laura Osur Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Osur, Laura, "Netflix and the Development of the Internet Television Network" (2016). Dissertations - ALL. 448. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/448 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract When Netflix launched in April 1998, Internet video was in its infancy. Eighteen years later, Netflix has developed into the first truly global Internet TV network. Many books have been written about the five broadcast networks – NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and the CW – and many about the major cable networks – HBO, CNN, MTV, Nickelodeon, just to name a few – and this is the fitting time to undertake a detailed analysis of how Netflix, as the preeminent Internet TV networks, has come to be. This book, then, combines historical, industrial, and textual analysis to investigate, contextualize, and historicize Netflix's development as an Internet TV network. The book is split into four chapters. The first explores the ways in which Netflix's development during its early years a DVD-by-mail company – 1998-2007, a period I am calling "Netflix as Rental Company" – lay the foundations for the company's future iterations and successes. During this period, Netflix adapted DVD distribution to the Internet, revolutionizing the way viewers receive, watch, and choose content, and built a brand reputation on consumer-centric innovation.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Introduction James Bennett Charles Elkan Bing Liu Netflix Department of Computer Science and Department of Computer Science 100 Winchester Circle Engineering University of Illinois at Chicago Los Gatos, CA 95032 University of California, San Diego 851 S. Morgan Street La Jolla, CA 92093-0404 Chicago, IL 60607-7053 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Padhraic Smyth Domonkos Tikk Department of Computer Science Department of Telecom. & Media Informatics University of California, Irvine Budapest University of Technology and Economics CA 92697-3425 H-1117 Budapest, Magyar Tudósok krt. 2, Hungary [email protected] [email protected] INTRODUCTION Both tasks employed the Netflix Prize training data set [2], which The KDD Cup is the oldest of the many data mining competitions consists of more than 100 million ratings from over 480 thousand that are now popular [1]. It is an integral part of the annual ACM randomly-chosen, anonymous customers on nearly 18 thousand SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and movie titles. The data were collected between October, 1998 and Data Mining (KDD). In 2007, the traditional KDD Cup December, 2005 and reflect the distribution of all ratings received competition was augmented with a workshop with a focus on the by Netflix during this period. The ratings are on a scale from 1 to concurrently active Netflix Prize competition [2]. The KDD Cup 5 (integral) stars. itself in 2007 consisted of a prediction competition using Netflix Task 1 (Who Rated What in 2006): The task was to predict which movie rating data, with tasks that were different and separate from users rated which movies in 2006.
    [Show full text]
  • Learning Preferences of New Users in Recommender Systems: an Information Theoretic Approach
    Learning Preferences of New Users in Recommender Systems: An Information Theoretic Approach Al Mamunur Rashid, George Karypis, and John Riedl Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN-55455 {arashid, karypis, riedl}@cs.umn.edu Abstract. Recommender systems are a nice tool to help nd items of interest from an overwhelming number of available items. Collaborative Filtering (CF), the best known technology for recommender systems, is based on the idea that a set of like-minded users can help each other nd useful information. A new user poses a challenge to CF recommenders, since the system has no knowledge about the preferences of the new user, and therefore cannot provide personalized recommendations. A new user preference elicitation strategy needs to ensure that the user does not a) abandon a lengthy signup process, and b) lose interest in returning to the site due to the low quality of initial recommendations. We extend the work of [23] in this paper by incrementally developing a set of in- formation theoretic strategies for the new user problem. We propose an oine simulation framework, and evaluate the strategies through exten- sive oine simulations and an online experiment with real users of a live recommender system. 1 Introduction Collaborative Filtering (CF)-based recommender systems generate recommen- dations for a user by utilizing the opinions of other users with similar taste. These recommender systems are a nice tool bringing mutual benets to both users and the operators of the sites with too much information. Users benet as they are able to nd items of interest from an unmanageable number of available items.
    [Show full text]
  • ŠKODA AUTO VYSOKÁ ŠKOLA O.P.S. Valuation of Netflix, Inc. Diploma
    ŠKODA AUTO VYSOKÁ ŠKOLA o.p.s. Course: Economics and Management Field of study/specialisation: Corporate Finance in International Business Valuation of Netflix, Inc. Diploma Thesis Bc. Alena Vershinina Thesis Supervisor: doc. Ing. Tomáš Krabec, Ph.D., MBA 2 I declare that I have prepared this thesis on my own and listed all the sources used in the bibliography. I declare that, while preparing the thesis, I followed the internal regulation of ŠKODA AUTO VYSOKÁ ŠKOLA o.p.s. (hereinafter referred to as ŠAVŠ), directive OS.17.10 Thesis guidelines. I am aware that this thesis is covered by Act No. 121/2000 Coll., the Copyright Act, that it is schoolwork within the meaning of Section 60 and that under Section 35 (3) ŠAVŠ is entitled to use my thesis for educational purposes or internal requirements. I agree with my thesis being published in accordance with Section 47b of Act No. 111/1998 Coll., on Higher Education Institutions. I understand that ŠAVŠ has the right to enter into a licence agreement for this work under standard conditions. If I use this thesis or grant a licence for its use, I agree to inform ŠAVŠ about it. In this case, ŠAVŠ is entitled to demand a contribution to cover the costs incurred in the creation of this work up to their actual amount. Mladá Boleslav, Date ......... 3 I would like to thank doc. Ing. Tomáš Krabec, Ph.D., MBA for his professional supervision of my thesis, advice, and information. I also want to thank the ŠAVS management for their support of the students’ initiative.
    [Show full text]
  • When Diversity Met Accuracy: a Story of Recommender Systems †
    proceedings Extended Abstract When Diversity Met Accuracy: A Story of Recommender Systems † Alfonso Landin * , Eva Suárez-García and Daniel Valcarce Department of Computer Science, University of A Coruña, 15071 A Coruña, Spain; [email protected] (E.S.-G.); [email protected] (D.V.) * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +34-881-01-1276 † Presented at the XoveTIC Congress, A Coruña, Spain, 27–28 September 2018. Published: 14 September 2018 Abstract: Diversity and accuracy are frequently considered as two irreconcilable goals in the field of Recommender Systems. In this paper, we study different approaches to recommendation, based on collaborative filtering, which intend to improve both sides of this trade-off. We performed a battery of experiments measuring precision, diversity and novelty on different algorithms. We show that some of these approaches are able to improve the results in all the metrics with respect to classical collaborative filtering algorithms, proving to be both more accurate and more diverse. Moreover, we show how some of these techniques can be tuned easily to favour one side of this trade-off over the other, based on user desires or business objectives, by simply adjusting some of their parameters. Keywords: recommender systems; collaborative filtering; diversity; novelty 1. Introduction Over the years the user experience with different services has shifted from a proactive approach, where the user actively look for content, to one where the user is more passive and content is suggested to her by the service. This has been possible due to the advance in the field of recommender systems (RS), making it possible to make better suggestions to the users, personalized to their preferences.
    [Show full text]
  • Binary Principal Component Analysis in the Netflix Collaborative Filtering Task
    BINARY PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS IN THE NETFLIX COLLABORATIVE FILTERING TASK Laszl´ o´ Kozma, Alexander Ilin, Tapani Raiko Helsinki University of Technology Adaptive Informatics Research Center P.O. Box 5400, FI-02015 TKK, Finland firstname.lastname@tkk.fi ABSTRACT teams. Among the popular ones are nearest neighbor meth- ods on either users, items or both, and methods using matrix We propose an algorithm for binary principal component decomposition [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. It seems that no single method analysis (PCA) that scales well to very high dimensional can provide prediction accuracy comparable with the cur- and very sparse data. Binary PCA finds components from rent leaders in the competition. The most successful teams data assuming Bernoulli distributions for the observations. use a blend of a high number of different algorithms [3]. The probabilistic approach allows for straightforward treat- Thus, designing methods that may not be extremely good ment of missing values. An example application is collabo- in the overall performance but which look at the data at a rative filtering using the Netflix data. The results are compa- different angle may be beneficial. rable with those reported for single methods in the literature and through blending we are able to improve our previously obtained best result with PCA. The method presented in this work follows the matrix decomposition approach, which models the ratings using 1. INTRODUCTION a linear combination of some features (factors) character- izing the items and users. In contrast to other algorithms Recommendation systems form an integral component of reported in the Netflix competition, we first binarize the many modern e-commerce websites.
    [Show full text]
  • UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Bag-Of-Concepts As a Movie
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO Bag-of-Concepts as a Movie Genome and Representation A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Master of Science in Computer Science by Colin Zhou Committee in charge: Professor Shlomo Dubnov, Chair Professor Sanjoy Dasgupta Professor Lawrence Saul 2016 The Thesis of Colin Zhou is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Chair University of California, San Diego 2016 iii DEDICATION For Mom and Dad iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page........................................................................................................... iii Dedication.................................................................................................................. iv Table of Contents....................................................................................................... v List of Figures and Tables.......................................................................................... vi Abstract of the Thesis................................................................................................ vii Introduction................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 Background............................................................................................... 3 1.1 Vector Space Models............................................................................... 3 1.1.1. Bag-of-Words........................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Statistical Significance of the Netflix Challenge
    Statistical Science 2012, Vol. 27, No. 2, 202–231 DOI: 10.1214/11-STS368 c Institute of Mathematical Statistics, 2012 Statistical Significance of the Netflix Challenge Andrey Feuerverger, Yu He and Shashi Khatri Abstract. Inspired by the legacy of the Netflix contest, we provide an overview of what has been learned—from our own efforts, and those of others—concerning the problems of collaborative filtering and rec- ommender systems. The data set consists of about 100 million movie ratings (from 1 to 5 stars) involving some 480 thousand users and some 18 thousand movies; the associated ratings matrix is about 99% sparse. The goal is to predict ratings that users will give to movies; systems which can do this accurately have significant commercial applications, particularly on the world wide web. We discuss, in some detail, ap- proaches to “baseline” modeling, singular value decomposition (SVD), as well as kNN (nearest neighbor) and neural network models; temporal effects, cross-validation issues, ensemble methods and other considera- tions are discussed as well. We compare existing models in a search for new models, and also discuss the mission-critical issues of penalization and parameter shrinkage which arise when the dimensions of a pa- rameter space reaches into the millions. Although much work on such problems has been carried out by the computer science and machine learning communities, our goal here is to address a statistical audience, and to provide a primarily statistical treatment of the lessons that have been learned from this remarkable set of data. Key words and phrases: Collaborative filtering, cross-validation, ef- fective number of degrees of freedom, empirical Bayes, ensemble meth- ods, gradient descent, latent factors, nearest neighbors, Netflix contest, neural networks, penalization, prediction error, recommender systems, restricted Boltzmann machines, shrinkage, singular value decomposi- tion.
    [Show full text]
  • Movie Recommendations Using Matrix Factorization
    DEGREE PROJECT IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING, FIRST CYCLE, 15 CREDITS STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2016 Movie recommendations using matrix factorization JAKOB IVARSSON MATHIAS LINDGREN KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SCHOOL OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND COMMUNICATION CSC KTH Movie recommendations using matrix factorization Jakob Ivarsson and Mathias Lindgren Degree Project in Computer Science DD143X Supervised by Arvind Kumar Examiner Orjan¨ Ekeberg 11 maj 2016 Abstract A recommender system is a tool for recommending personalized con- tent for users based on previous behaviour. This thesis examines the impact of considering item and user bias in matrix factorization for im- plementing recommender systems. Previous work have shown that user bias have an impact on the predicting power of a recommender system. In this study two different implementations of matrix factorization us- ing stochastic gradient descent are applied to the MovieLens 10M dataset to extract latent features, one of which takes movie and user bias into consideration. The algorithms performed similarly when looking at the prediction capabilities. When examining the features extracted from the two algorithms there was a strong correlation between extracted features and movie genres. We show that each feature form a distinct category of movies where each movie is represented as a combination of the categories. We also show how features can be used to recommend similar movies. Sammanfattning Ett rekommendationssystem ¨ar ett verktyg f¨or att rekommendera an- passat inneh˚allf¨or anv¨andare baserat p˚atidigare beteende hos anv¨andare. I denna avhandling unders¨oker vi hur ett system som anv¨ander matrisfak- torisering p˚averkas n¨ar man tar h¨ansyn till partiskhet.
    [Show full text]
  • Preference Elicitation Techniques for Group Recommender Systems ⇑ Inma Garcia , Sergio Pajares, Laura Sebastia, Eva Onaindia
    Information Sciences xxx (2011) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Information Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ins Preference elicitation techniques for group recommender systems ⇑ Inma Garcia , Sergio Pajares, Laura Sebastia, Eva Onaindia Universitat Politècnica de València, Camino de Vera s/n, E46022 Valencia, Spain article info abstract Article history: A key issue in group recommendation is how to combine the individual preferences of dif- Received 31 January 2011 ferent users that form a group and elicit a profile that accurately reflects the tastes of all Received in revised form 18 October 2011 members in the group. Most Group Recommender Systems (GRSs) make use of some sort Accepted 26 November 2011 of method for aggregating the preference models of individual users to elicit a recommen- Available online xxxx dation that is satisfactory for the whole group. In general, most GRSs offer good results, but each of them have only been tested in one application domain. Keywords: This paper describes a domain-independent GRS that has been used in two different Group recommender systems application domains. In order to create the group preference model, we select two tech- Group profile Preference elicitation niques that are widely used in other GRSs and we compare them with two novel tech- niques. Our aim is to come up with a model that weighs the preferences of all the individuals to the same extent in such a way that no member in the group is particularly satisfied or dissatisfied with the final recommendations. Ó 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction A Recommender System (RS) [52] is a widely used mechanism for providing advice to people in order to select a set of items, activities or any other kind of product.
    [Show full text]