An enhanced hybridized approach for group recommendation via reliable ratings

Abstract

A group recommender system aim's to provide relevant information to all members of the group. To determine group preferences, the majority of existing studies use aggregation approaches. An aggregation method is a strategy for recommending products to a group by combining the individual preferences of group members. So far, a slew of different types of aggregation algorithms has been discovered. However, they only aggregate one component of the offered ratings (e.g., counts, rankings, high averages), which limits their ability to capture group members' proclivities. This study proposes a novel aggregation method called weighted count that aggregates ratings by providing weights equal to the number of users who provide ratings to an item (location). In addition, the study proposes combining additive utilitarian and weighted count approaches to highlight popular locations on which group members agreed. Experiments on a benchmark check-in dataset demonstrated that the proposed blended technique surpasses the existing methods significantly.