A Multicriteria Collaborative Filtering Approach Using the Indifference Relation and its Application to Initiator Recommendation for Group-Buying

For recommender systems, the main aim of the popular collaborative filtering approaches is to recommend items that users with similar preferences have liked in the past. Single-criterion recommender systems have been successfully used in several applications. Because leveraging multicriteria information can potentially improve recommendation accuracy, multicriteria rating systems that allow users to assign ratings to various content attributes of items they have consumed have become the focus in recommendation systems. By treating the recommendation of items as a multicriteria decision problem, it is interesting to incorporate the preference relation of users of multicriteria decision making (MCDM) into the similarity measure for a collaborative filtering approach. For this, the well-known indifference relation can justify a discrimination or similarity between any two users, if outranking relation theory is incorporated. The applicability of the proposed single-criterion and multicriteria recommendation approaches to the recommendation of initiators on a group-buying website was examined. Experimental results have demonstrated that the generalization ability of the proposed multicriteria recommendation approach performs well in comparison to other single-criterion and multicriteria collaborative filtering approaches.