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A group package recommender based on learning group preferences, multi-criteria decision analysis, and voting

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EURO Journal on Decision Processes

Abstract

This paper proposes a group package recommender framework, which provides recommendations on dynamically defined packages of products and services. It focuses on extending recommender systems in three ways: (1) to consider composite, rather than atomic, recommendations; (2) to deal with multiple, rather than single, criteria associated with recommendations; and, most importantly; (3) to support groups of users rather than individual users. This framework is based on: (1) defining the space of alternatives; (2) eliciting the utility function for each individual decision maker; (3) estimating the group utility function; (4) using the group utility function to find an optimal recommendation alternative; (5) constructing a set of diverse recommendations which contain the optimal recommendation alternative; and (6) applying alternative voting methods from social choice theories, to refine the recommendations. To evaluate the group recommender performance under each applied voting method, a preliminary experimental real-world user study is conducted, which shows that the proposed framework is able to produce a small set of recommendations that retain near optimal recommendations in terms of precision and recall.

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Notes

  1. Note that (Alodhaibi et al. 2010) used a different normalization based on Euclidean distance \(\left( {\left| {\overrightarrow {w} } \right| = \sqrt {\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{n} {w_{i}^{2} = 1} } } \right),\) which we modified to a more commonly used normalization.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, 4400 University Drive 4A4, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Hanan Mengash & Alexander Brodsky

  2. Princes Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

    Hanan Mengash

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  1. Hanan Mengash
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  2. Alexander Brodsky
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Correspondence to Hanan Mengash.

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Mengash, H., Brodsky, A. A group package recommender based on learning group preferences, multi-criteria decision analysis, and voting. EURO J Decis Process 3, 275–304 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40070-015-0048-y

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