FindYourFavorite: An Interactive System for Finding the User's Favorite Tuple in the Database

When faced with a database containing millions of tuples, an end user might be only interested in finding his/her favorite tuple in the database. In this paper, we study how to help an end user to find such a favorite tuple with a few user interactions. In each interaction, a user is presented with a small number of tuples (which can be artificial tuples outside the database or true tuples inside the database) and s/he is asked to indicate the tuple s/he favors the most among them. Different from the previous work which displays artificial tuples to users during the interaction and requires heavy user interactions, we achieve a stronger result. Specifically, we use a concept, called the utility hyperplane, to model the user preference and an effective pruning strategy to locate the favorite tuple for a user in the whole database. Based on these techniques, we developed an interactive system, called FindYourFavorite, and demonstrate that the system could identify the favorite tuple for a user with a few user interactions by always displaying true tuples in the database.