Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
9-2022
Abstract
Recommender Systems (RecSys) provide suggestions in many decision-making processes. Given that groups of people can perform many real-world activities (e.g., a group of people attending a conference looking for a place to dine), the need for recommendations for groups has increased. A wide range of Group Recommender Systems (GRecSys) has been developed to aggregate individual preferences to group preferences. We analyze 175 studies related to GRecSys. Previous works evaluate their systems using different types of groups (sizes and cohesiveness), and most of such works focus on testing their systems using only one type of item, called Experience Goods (EG). As a consequence, it is hard to get consistent conclusions about the performance of GRecSys. We present the aggregation strategies and aggregation functions that GRecSys commonly use to aggregate group members’ preferences. This study experimentally compares the performance (i.e., accuracy, ranking quality, and usefulness) using four metrics (Hit Ratio, Normalize Discounted Cumulative Gain, Diversity, and Coverage) of eight representative RecSys for group recommendations on ephemeral groups. Moreover, we use two different aggregation strategies, 10 different aggregation functions, and two different types of items on two types of datasets (EG and Search Goods (SG)) containing real-life datasets. The results show that the evaluation of GRecSys needs to use both EG and SG types of data, because the different characteristics of datasets lead to different performance. GRecSys using Singular Value Decomposition or Neural Collaborative Filtering methods work better than others. It is observed that the Average aggregation function is the one that produces better results.
Keywords
recommender systems, group recommender systems, aggregation strategies, recommendation scenarios
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems
Research Areas
Data Science and Engineering
Publication
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
Volume
13
Issue
6
First Page
1
Last Page
26
ISSN
2157-6904
Identifier
10.1145/3542804
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
CEH-VARELA, Edgar; CAO, Huiping; and LAUW, Hady Wirawan.
Performance evaluation of aggregation-based group recommender systems for ephemeral groups. (2022). ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. 13, (6), 1-26.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/7606
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3542804