A fuzzy content-based group recommender system with dynamic selection of the aggregation functions

Recommender systems are currently software tools that are focused on providing users with the best choices in an overloaded search space of possible options. Hence, group recommender systems have recently become an important trend in recommendation, because they aim at recommending a special type of items so-called social items, that tend to be consumed in groups such as TV programs, travel packages, etc. Among the different types of algorithms applied for group recommender systems, this paper is focused on content-based group recommender systems, as a novel group recommendation paradigm that exploits item features in the recommendation generation process. Specifically, our goal is to introduce a new content-based group recommendation approach, based on the recommendation aggregation paradigm whose main novelty is the development of a dynamic selection process of the aggregation scheme. Such an approach is centered on the identification of group's characteristics that are matching with the most appropriate function to use in the individual recommendation aggregation step. To perform such a matching, it is proposed a fuzzy decision tree induction process. The experimental evaluation shows that this scheme improves the recommendation performance of previous content-based group recommendation approaches, as well as it serves a starting point for further research based on this dynamic selection paradigm.