Managing uncertainty in group recommending processes

AbstractWhile the problem of building recommender systems has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most recommender systems are designed for recommending items to individuals. The aim of this paper is to automatically recommend a ranked list of new items to a group of users. We will investigate the value of using Bayesian networks to represent the different uncertainties involved in a group recommending process, i.e. those uncertainties related to mechanisms that govern the interactions between group members and the processes leading to the final choice or recommendation. We will also show how the most common aggregation strategies might be encoded using a Bayesian network formalism. The proposed model can be considered as a collaborative Bayesian network-based group recommender system, where group ratings are computed from the past voting patterns of other users with similar tastes.

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