Aggregation Functions for Recommender Systems

This chapter gives an overview of aggregation functions and their use in recommender systems. The classical weighted average lies at the heart of various recommendation mechanisms, often being employed to combine item feature scores or predict ratings from similar users. Some improvements to accuracy and robustness can be achieved by aggregating different measures of similarity or using an average of recommendations obtained through different techniques. Advances made in the theory of aggregation functions therefore have the potential to deliver increased performance to many recommender systems. We provide definitions of some important families and properties, sophisticated methods of construction, and various examples of aggregation functions in the domain of recommender systems.