A Package Recommendation Framework Based on Collaborative Filtering and Preference Score Maximization

The popularity of recommendation systems has made them a substantial component of many applications and projects. This work proposes a framework for package recommendations that try to meet users’ preferences as much as possible through the satisfaction of several criteria. This is achieved by modeling the relation between the items and the categories these items belong to aiming to recommend to each user the top-k packages which cover their preferred categories and the restriction of a maximum package cost. Our contribution includes an optimal and a greedy solution. The novelty of the optimal solution is that it combines the collaborative filtering predictions with a graph based model to produce recommendations. The problem is expressed through a minimum cost flow network and is solved by integer linear programming. The greedy solution performs with a low computational complexity and provides recommendations which are close to the optimal solution. We have evaluated and compared our framework with a baseline method by using two popular recommendation datasets and we have obtained promising results on a set of widely accepted evaluation metrics.