Session: All About Groups

Chair: Pearl Pu
Date: Tuesday, September 28, 17:30‐19:00

• Affiliation recommendation using auxiliary networks

  by Vishvas Vasuki, Nagarajan Natarajan, Zhengdong Lu, Inderjit S. Dhillon

  Social network analysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years. In many social networks, besides friendship links amongst users, the phenomenon of users associating themselves with groups or communities is common. Thus, two networks exist simultaneously: the friendship network among users, and the affiliation network between users and groups. In this paper, we tackle the affiliation recommendation problem, where the task is to predict or suggest new affiliations between users and communities, given the current state of the friendship and affiliation networks. More generally, affiliations need not be community affiliations – they can be a user’s taste, so affiliation recommendation algorithms have applications beyond community recommendation. In this paper, we show that information from the friendship network can indeed be fruitfully exploited in making affiliation recommendations. Using a simple way of combining these networks, we suggest two models of user-community affinity for the purpose of making affiliation recommendations: one based on graph proximity, and another using latent factors to model users and communities. We explore the two classes of affiliation recommendation algorithms suggested by these models. We evaluate these algorithms on two real world networks – Orkut and Youtube. In doing so, we motivate and propose a way of evaluating recommenders, by measuring how good the top 50 recommendations are for the average user, and demonstrate the importance of choosing the right evaluation strategy. The algorithms suggested by the graph proximity model turn out to be the most effective and efficient. This use of link prediction techniques for the purpose of affiliation recommendation is, to our knowledge, novel.

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• Group-based recipe recommendations: analysis of data aggregation strategies

  by Shlomo Berkovsky, Jill Freyne

  Collaborative filtering recommendations were designed primarily for individual user models and recommendations. However, nowadays more and more scenarios evolve, in which the recommended items are consumed by groups of users rather than by individuals. This raises the need to uncover the most appropriate group-based collaborative filtering recommendation strategy. In this work we investigate the use of aggregated group data in collaborative filtering recipe recommendations. We present results of a study that exploits recipe ratings provided by families of users, in order to evaluate the accuracy of several group recommendation strategies and weighting models, and analyze the impact of switching strategies, data aggregation heuristics, and group characteristics on the performance of recommendations.

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• Group recommendations with rank aggregation and collaborative filtering

  by Linas Baltrunas, Tadas Makcinskas, Francesco Ricci

  The majority of recommender systems are designed to make recommendations for individual users. However, in some circumstances the items to be selected are not intended for personal usage but for a group; e.g., a DVD could be watched by a group of friends. In order to generate effective recommendations for a group the system must satisfy, as much as possible, the individual preferences of the group’s members.

  This paper analyzes the effectiveness of group recommendations obtained aggregating the individual lists of recommendations produced by a collaborative filtering system. We compare the effectiveness of individual and group recommendation lists using normalized discounted cumulative gain. It is observed that the effectiveness of a group recommendation does not necessarily decrease when the group size grows. Moreover, when individual recommendations are not effective a user could obtain better suggestions looking at the group recommendations. Finally, it is shown that the more alike the users in the group are, the more effective the group recommendations are.

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