Making collaborative group recommendations based on modal symbolic data

Abstract

In recent years, recommender systems have achieved great success. Popular sites give thousands of recommendations every day. However, despite the fact that many activities are carried out in groups, like going to the theater with friends, these systems are focused on recommending items for sole users. This brings out the need of systems capable of performing recommendations for groups of people, a domain that has received little attention in the literature. In this article we introduce a novel method of making collaborative recommendations for groups, based on models built using techniques from symbolic data analysis. After, we empirically evaluate the proposed method to see its behaviour for groups of different sizes and degrees of homogeneity, and compare the achieved results with both an aggregation-based methodology previously proposed and a baseline methodology. © Springer-Verlag 2004.